Vishwanathan Anand versus Vladimir Kramnik

This is the match-up that most chess aficionados have been waiting for. The stage is set on October the 14th for the two ambassadors of chess to put their Queen's Gambit, Caro Kann, King's Indian, Ruy Lopez and most importantly Petrov's defence to test as they face off in the much awaited World chess Championship. The contest takes place in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn. All the chess connoisseurs would agree that the level of the match up would live up to the hype and match the grade set by the battles between Capablanca - Alekhine, Fischer - Spassky and Kasparov - Karpov.

A brief look at the profiles of Vishy and Kramnik...

Vishwanathan Anand

Anand shot into limelight on the world stage by winning the Reggio Emilia Chess Tournament (Category 18) ahead of Kasparov and Karpov in the strongest tournament ever held until this time i.e 1991-92. Anand is considered the most complete player of all time as his haul of 4 chess oscars(a record he shares with Bobby Fischer) testifies. He is a master in tournament play which he has shown time to time by winning the prestigious Corus event 5 times (1989,1998,2003,2004 & 2006), Linares Super Tournament 3 times (1998 , 2007 and 2008), Dortmund Sparkassen 3 times (1996,2000 & 2004) and other important events like, Madrid Masters, Biel etc.

Vladimir Kramnik

Yet another case in point of the soviet monopoly, this 33 year old super grand masters excels in match play. Vladimir Kramnik was born in Tuapse, on June 25, 1975. In 1991 he won The World Under 18 Championship, and began a string of international success. At the Manila Olympiad 1992, he achieved a gold medal for best result on reserve board. Major tournament triumphs were soon to follow, such as Dortmund 1995, Tilburg 1997, and Wijk aan Zee 1998. Dortmund became a favorite stop, as Kramnik would go on to win seven more times, either as shared champion, or clear first. In 2000 Kramnik won his first Linares tournament, completing his set of victories in all three of chess’s “triple crown” events: Corus, Linares, and Dortmund. In 2000 Kramnik reached the pinnacle by defeating long-time champion Garry Kasparov for the World Championship in London by the score of 8 1/2 to 6 1/2. Kasparov was reported as saying, “He is the hardest player to beat in the world.”
The $1 million Kramnik-Topalov World Championship Match (2006), was played in Elista from September 21 to October 13, and drew record numbers of online followers on most major chess sites. After much controversy surrounding a forfeit in round 5, Kramnik won in the tiebreak phase, thereby becoming the first unified World Chess Champion since the schism of 1993.


Considering their head to head records one is struck by the clear pattern emerging which shows Anand leading 19 to 13, with 82 games ending in draw. A closer look reveals that 15 of Anand's 19 wins came in the rapid format. Kramnik on the other hand leads Anand 6 games to 4 on classical front giving himself a slight edge as the championship goes underway. Assisting Anand is his mate Surya Sekhar Ganguly and the 16 year old Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen. The Kramnik Camp boasts of Peter Leko- the Hungarian GM who is beleived to have worked with Anand before his final match against Karpov in 1998.

The stakes are much higher for Anand this time as he gets set to prove his detractors wrong and thus showcase his killer instinct and mental strength in match play format. Although he has a bevy a records and tournaments under his belt a win against Kramnik this time while would rank ahead of them. Also is an elusive chance to put Soviet rule to an end and thus become the undisputed champion of the world.

Champions Of The World

So...now that yet another dream of mine has been fulfilled by the Almighty, I hereby present to you "Champions of the World" featuring Kishan(me) and Sahil(my teammate) representing our very own NSIT...

ROUND 1- POWER PLAY


ROUND 2- MIDDLE OVERS


ROUND 3- SLOG OVERS


au revoir...

THE SOPHOMORE YEAR

After a long hiatus I am back to where "The Khan's" and "The Bachchan's" thrive- Blogging.

I am extremely contrite to my(blog's) dear readers(if there are any) and especially to my Blog, which bore the brunt of my indifference to it. Next, I would like extend my thanks to Saurav who inspired me to write about self and experiences and also to my very dear cronies- Neerav, Nitin and Siddharth(in alphabetical order) who in due course would occupy some length of the post. After all those apologies and gratitudes I would like to move on to the main text...

My second year began amidst a great deal of confusion which was due to a motley of reasons. Shifting of our dwelling to Faridabad and subsequent worries about getting a hostel accommodation ate up a majority of time in August. Finally, lady luck and a timely application(to the hostel warden) landed me to my 'second home'- A home which I went on to share with my dearest friends and spent some of the most memorable moments of my existence. A brief character sketch of my room-mates...

NEERAV - A person with a huge repertoire of gags. Can befriend anybody with his bewitching smile and baby-ish diction. An Individual with a great sense of music. Overall, a great 'CHARACTER'.

SIDDHARTH - A person who is 'politically correct'. A guy who believes that he preserves a non-sentimental facet. Another distinct feature is the crimson hue which spreads across his cheeks when he is happy. Overall, a no-nonsense human being.

NITIN - Although he was not alloted the room with the triumvirate of us, he completes our Quartet. The 'Creative mind' of our group.

So, the third semester(The toughest semester as conceived by some ICE souls) commenced. With it started new resolutions and ambitions. Resolutions- to do well, to study hard, be punctual, plan my studies out and other cliches which never seem to desert you. And, also started my tryst with the hostel and a sojourn with neighbors( constituted of professors and M.Tech 'Uncles' besides my batch mates).

Third sem teachers were a complete aberration. The courses thus suffered as a result of their incompetence. The subjects on the other hand sparked some sort of interest as they were a bit practical in nature and a deviation from the run of the mill stuff we did so far.

Hostel life to describe in a word was-fun. A far cry from the comforts of the home though, where your mother wakes you up every morning and all the morning chores are done in complete privacy without anyone hurrying you out, where your father is there to take complete care of you, where you are the center of attraction. But yes, hostel has its share of advantages too- one doesn't need to wake up at 5 in the morning and brave the roads to reach the college. Hostel life makes you a wiser person, a more mature human being as one gets to deal with a plethora of experiences and different kinds of mindsets and thus helps you to prepare for the vagaries of life.

Flat-Mates

PUPPETS...

Sleeping me...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Gus Van Santana???

A normal day at the hostel consisted of waking up at about 7:30, perform all the chores(Sid and Neerav are asleep all this while oblivious of everything) and a quiet prayer before a miniature Lord Krishna statue. At about 9:30 the terzetto of us proceed towards our classes. Classes usually used to be dozing sessions for me. All that was left after a hour of class were pages of badly scribed notes and blurred memories of the teacher 'boring' the class. If not for the classes we had mass-bunks which was yet another session of 'vellapanti' and gossips. All of this along with the missed lunch hour(primarily due to the terrible mess(y) food and the pathetic canteen food) constituted a day spent during the college hours. Not to miss the occasional IEEE meetings and the peer-to-peer-help workshops which was yet another feature of the third semester. Evening was usually spent playing cricket or watching a movie besides tittle-tattles.

The Class

NSIT- In various Hues

Dwelling onto MD- (Machine Drawing for laymen). Most of our third-sem was wasted under the weight of the Drawing board and piles of sheets which we got as homework. How could I forget those hours and hours of labor put into replicating and scaling all those machine joints, bearings, couplings onto the 841*580 mm drawing sheets? Those were really the most painful and boring sessions we had in the hostel, made easier by the intermittent walks I took with Neerav discussing all those worldly issues.

. . . August gone, came September and thus brought mid-sems along. Uneventfully, giving us a few jitters they passed away promising a return the very next semester. Also that went by was my birthday which was spent guzzling away the facts from the books to glory.

We had our Annual Technical fest- Innovision in October. Apart from taking part in one of the events namely 'carnage' in which we had to 'design and fabricate' a miniature ATV( The event was a complete farce), I along with 3 of my batch mates organized a Corporate quiz which was well received and appreciated by the quizzing fraternities. Other competitions included Robowars, technical paper presentation, micro mouse, line-follower along with non-technical events like Business plan presentation which had the budding 'Ogilvy's' and 'Murdoch's' presenting their business and marketing ideas. Rest of October was spent attending college and mentally preparing for the exams in November. In came our fourth room-mate Abhishek whom we called 'IEEE' because of his affinity to that society.

The long awaited winter(but the not-so-long-awaited November) descended. I shifted my base to Hostel for a longish period of 20 days to prepare for the exams. The ordeal thus begun. Day after day the pressure mounted and the tension gripped us. We acquainted ourselves with the melancholy truth. The truth that was, of 'the toughest exams of the toughest semester'. Thanks to Neerav's gags and Hanuman Chalisa( All four of us used to perceive it via the auditory sense daily) the truth was finally over. The 'toughest' semester was over(or was it too early to predict that it was over till the results spare us?).

Yes...We had to read them all...

so are we...

We had our well deserved holidays. The Time when we could afford to rest our encephalon set in. Time had come when we could leave our assiduous ways and just laze around in pursuit of a good, long and a proverbial Kumbhkarna's sopor.

After catching some Z's(actually a lot of them) I then had to start with yet another semester which I successfully did. So, here's a brief account of my fourth sem put in a lucid point format to keep the interest of my readers intact...

• Tried to be more systematic with my studies without any success.

• Tried to involve myself in IEEE activities, even attended a bi-annual meet at BVP, only to see my interest wane thereon.

• QUIZINES: A brainchild of ABx, started by SID G under IEEE-NSIT's entrepreneurship SIG(Special Interest Group). QUIZINES is basically a venture which was started with an aim to provide quizzing solutions to schools, colleges and other institutions. We struck a chord immediately by starting a website and hosting a series of quizzes during MOKSHA- The cultural festival of NSIT. I worked on the quiz questions and they came of really well. What also contibuted to the success of our debut event was some sound marketting strategies adopted by SID G and others in the group. An ample testimony to these very facts would be the 50,000 odd hits our website has received since the inception of our inaugural event. But, the blunder we committed was that we laid low after our initial success due to some inadvertent reasons which has now resulted in extreme dormancy of the venture. what must now be done is to try and revive Quizines by hiring a few interested quizzing brains from the new stock of freshers who descent on the lands of NSIT this August and also hope for the best.

• Intra college Cricket tournament: After the initial high of two victories in which I played my due part, our victory campaign laid low by an unexpected loss to the ECE class of our own batch. Nothing went well for us on that fateful day. We were shot out for just 87 runs and the rest they say is history.

• MOKSHA-2008: The Quizzing events at this year's MOKSHA bore the brunt of some petty politics and mindsets which I would not like to get into all over again. So will stop at this. For the rest click here.

• NSIT Motorsports: After rocking their first show at South Africa they invited for new recruitments. Thanks to lady luck I got through and now am part of our next endeavor of rocking the 'Baja-spectacle' this time at Indore too.

• Results of Third Semester: They came, we saw, some cried, some rejoiced. I, exulted!!!

• Exams: As always we withered and dithered but finally, endured.

There is much more to my Second year which I want to share but which may not see the light of the day owing to my dysfunctional memory and deficient writing skills(I am trying my best to improve). I would like to request all the readers of this particular entry to drop in a comment or two and share your thoughts with me. I promise to be more punctual with my blog and my classes now that they are about to dawn.

All the very best to one and all who are stepping into yet another academic session, full of new journeys, full of tales and full of adventures...

CHEERS!!!