Meet filmmaker Amit Dutta, who believes chess can endlessly surprise and reward us

Stanley Kubrick was passionate about chess, as was Satyajit Ray

In the 1950s, the Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov wrote the book  Think like a Grandmaster, which became an instant classic. In the 90s, growing up as a chess-crazed boy in pre-Internet India, this book assumed a mythic aura within our circle. It seemed to hold the secrets of supremacy in this maddening, intoxicating game. Kotov took on the mantle of a Drona, whose  astras were almost impossible to attain, but once mastered, gave supreme power to the wielder’s hands.

After carefully monitoring the movement of nears and dears to ‘abroad’, I was able to lay my hands on it thanks to an uncle settled in London. The opening pages seemed simple enough (the first step to evaluate a position was to count how many pawns you had and compare that number to the opponent’s), but with bewildering rapidness, Kotov introduced the ‘tree of analysis’, complete with diagrams and graphs. The trunk of this tree was the move you were considering, its branches were all the possible replies of the opponent, your possible response to their response were the sub-branches and so on.

Immediately, the world plunged into an eternal forest, where tigers prowled, a forest I have not yet left, and perhaps will never find my way out of. Many years later, my grandmaster ambitions long gone, I was working with the filmmaker Amit Dutta on a script involving the royal game. I immediately transplanted this Kotovian forest to his neighbourhood, the thought-forests as immense as the stands of deodar and oak in the Himalayan foothills near his home studio in the Kangra valley.

I wrote every morning to the hammer of typewriters (Dutta also collects decrepit typewriters and coaxes them back to health). His latest patient is a portable Hermes; the mint green of its keys are so alluring that I’m tempted to type something, anything, just for the haptic inspiration.

Our conceit was that unlike Kurukshetra, the trouble between cousins is resolved through a giant chess tournament in a purpose-built city. The games drag on for years, decades even. And the inhabitants of the city live their lives, grow old, wait, pondering over each move relayed from the games hall.

Yet there is a thread that connects from our imagined city to the Olympiad in Chennai.

Dutta has been described as ‘the most famous Indian filmmaker you may have never heard of’, whose works have been feted at film festivals and by critics . Dutta laughs, “I mainly play chess and steal time from it to make films and write books.” He tells me, “that I discovered chess, is a miracle to me. I grew up in a small village 30 km away from Jammu city. My close friends were three Sikh brothers, two of whom were amazing chess players. They taught me the Indian rules, where the pawn moves only one square and the king castles by jumping like a knight and then comes back — a fascinating and peculiar movement. The three of us became obsessed with the game and played it all the time.”