‘Beautiful Board’: How chess saved an Indian people of alcohol, gambling | Health

Marotichal, India -Thephones, wallets and tea cups of half defeat the empty tables, except for one, in a tea house in southern India, where a crowd has formed around a chess board and two competitors.

One of them is Gowrishankar Jayaraj, 15. Surrounded by spectators competing for a view of the chess board, Jayaraj is competing with bandaged eyes.

Playing blind from the open of the game means that the adolescent must visualize, maintain and update a mental model of the board, since the movements of both players are communicated aloud by a designated referee.

Jayaraj is playing a much older John baby, whose expression is tense with discomfort. His shrugged shoulders and his mouth belonged that he is a handful of movements to lose his fourth game in almost 40 minutes.

“Gowrishankar is only 15 years old and is already a kind of chess prodigy. It hits me even when it is blind, ”says John.

‘People of Chess of India’

Jayaraj and John are residents of Marothichal, a sleepy town of almost 6,000 residents located at the foot of the Western Ghats in the picturesque Thrissur District of the state of Kerala de la India.

In the early 2000s, the chess community in Kerala knew Marothichal as the “People of Chess of India” because it is believed that at least one person in each home here is that he is better than chess. On the other side of the town, people feel regularly through the chess boards, competing in the shadow of the bus stops, the groceries outside the groceries and in the recess patio.

“More than 4,500 people here, or 75 percent, of the 6,000 residents of the village are competent players,” says John, who is also the president of the Marottichal Chess Association.

Jayaraj is currently in the 600 active active chess players in India, according to the World Chess Federation (FIDE), and hopes to increase the growing stature of India as the world leader in sport.

In September, India swept open and female gold medals in the 2024 chess Olympiad. Then, the country’s great youngest teacher, Gukesh Dommaraju, 18, won the World Chess Championship in December. And the great teacher Koneru Humpy crowned a year full of victory for India after he won the Rapid Women’s Women Women Chess Championship the same month.

Jayaraj, who currently has a FIDE 2012 qualification, hopes to follow the steps of the Indian heroes such as Viswanathan Anand and Dommaraju, and become a great teacher.

His dream reflects the long trip that Marotichal has taken to break a very different reputation from the one he currently enjoys.

‘King and Savior’

Four decades ago, the town was in the control of an alcohol addiction and a play crisis that pushed many families on the edge of ruin.

In the 1970s, three Marothichal homes were making nut -based alcohol for personal consumption. But in the early 80s, the village had become a regional center for illicit alcohol production.

“People not only drank, they made and sold liquor in their homes every night,” says Jayaraj Manazhy, a village resident, not related to Gowrishankar Jayaraj, tells Al Jazeera.

Commerce flowed between villages with Marottichal as a source of alcohol.

But agricultural families began to neglect their cattle and crops. With decreasing yields of the Earth, the villagers soon resorted to games of chance through card games in liquor production houses, from where betting corridors also operated.

The lack of regular income and alcohol dependence saw many families fall into poverty.

“The young children ran out of clothes to wear. Others were starving, ”says another place, who requested anonymity. There was no hope at the end of the epidemic.

Until Charaliyil Unnikrishnan, a local resident turned into exile, returned to Marothichal at the end of the 1980s.

Unnikrishnan had been rejected by his family for joining a Maoist movement in his youth. He resigned from the movement and returned to his 30 years to establish a tea house in the heart of the town.

But the influence that alcohol had on his people disturbed the former rebel. “It was a dark moment at that time for our community,” recalls Al Jazeera.

Unnikrishnan decided to act.

He brought together a small group of friends who had met for his adolescence in the town and began establishing contacts with the wives and mothers of liquor producers who were angry at their husbands and children for the production of headings.

In the course of the months, Unnikrishnan received isolated notices about the elaboration times of beer, which generally took place at night. Unnikrishnan and his friends would assault the houses where alcohol was produced and stored, destroying hidden supplies and the equipment used to produce it.

Sometimes, they found resistance, but unnikrishnan had accumulated the support of the other villagers who were desperate for change. The producers, with a decline demand and few means to restart their company, were overcome in number.

After the raids, Unnikrishnan would invite community members to play chess.

“The game gathered us. We started talking about that more and more, and people would meet to play instead of drinking, “says John, who obtained funds from other villages to create regional tournaments and campaign successfully so that chess becomes part of the plan of studies both in the lower and the superior and in the upper and in the upper and in primary schools in the town.

“We really began to rebuild our lives on this beautiful board,” he says.

In his store, Unnikrishnan served the villagers not only to tea, but also to their vision of a future free of alcohol addiction. And that, he told them, could be done through chess, an old strategy game that is believed to originate in India.

Soon, people absorbed by a chess board became a common view in the town.

Meanwhile, cases of alcohol addiction and game began to decrease in the town. The families, once devastated by the bottle, curled up together around a chess board, competing against loved ones for a maximum of a check partner.

“Before knowing chess, many (of us) were apathetic,” says Francis Kachapilly, a recovered alcoholic, while standing next to Unnikrishnan in the tea house watching Jayaraj and John play.

“We didn’t have an approach. Chess gave us something new. “

Unnikrishnan taught chess to almost 1,000 villagers and has competed internationally. Several young Marothichal players compete internationally and within India regularly.

In 2016, Marothichal received a universal Asian record for the Universal Records forum for the largest number of amateur competitors (1,001) who play chess simultaneously in Asia.

Unnikrishnan, now 67, is “known with love for the people of Marothichal as our King and Savior,” says John.

‘Chess brought me back to life’

Unlike the game, there is almost no element of chance in chess.

The game is deterministic: the player who makes the best collection of won movements; and rules and format eliminate the opportunity to cite adverse conditions such as excuses or blame bad luck for losses.

Unnikrishnan is reluctant to say that value chess imposes on making good decisions and avoiding bad is solely responsible for the reduction of alcoholism and game in Marothichal.

But he believes he had a “great impact.”

Throughout the world, chess has been fundamental to treat addiction and psychological and cognitive problems. In Spain, sport joined rehabilitation programs to treat drug addiction, alcohol and game. More recently, in the United Kingdom, the psychologist Rosie Meeks argued that prison chess clubs helped “reduce violence and conflict, develop communication and other skills, and promote the positive use of free time” among inmates .

Few have felt the benefit of chess more than Jayem Vallur.

The 59 -year -old is vice president of the Marothichal Chess Association and one of his most enthusiastic players.

Just before noon on a cool day in January at the TeaIkrishnan tea house, he opens his game with a radiant smile, and for the middle game, he laughs infectiously with his opponent. The pieces are exchanged on obscene jokes on the black and white board between them.

Twenty -five years ago, Vallur was fighting for his life after suffering a high -speed accident while driving his motorcycle. The first to respond fought his lifeless body of the road and took him to the hospital where he would spend two months hooked to life support machines.

“The doctors told my family and friends that my brain had been severely damaged by the accident,” Vallur tells Al Jazeera.

It was completely paralyzed at the beginning, but slowly began to recover the movement at the bottom of the body. Unnikrishnan and John were among their closest friends and would spend hours next to their hospital bed.

After Vallur began to show signs of improvement in his speech, his friends would bring a chess board with them during their visits. Soon, their cognitive functions began to improve. Today, only his right arm is paralyzed from the shoulder down.

Vallur believes that regular chess matches during his recovery helped. “Chess returned to life,” he says.

In 2023, Marottichal’s redemption attracted the attention of the filmmaker and writer Kaber Khurana, who directed a 35 -minute film, The Pawn of Marotichal, drawing the village’s fight with addiction to his recovery.

Khurana, whose film will be released this year, says that “he felt the enthusiasm, passion and energy of the people when he first visited the village.”

Back in the tea house of Unnikrishnan, the midday games begin to conclude. Vallur approaches the dish for a final game against Jayaraj, who returns to victorious.

“I taught his mother to play,” says Vallur, smiling. “He is going to proud all of India.”