It was 24th August 2020, India vs China World Chess Olympiad was going on when for the first time I played online on chess.com. In addition, it was on 3rd January 2022, approximately 1.5 years later I joined IPU. And roughly 1 year and 4 months later, I am writing this blog, just to reanalyse what have I done yet and what is left. Of course, when it comes to public blogs, I can’t reveal a lot but I will try my best to analyse. Life lately has been weird, things somehow are going in a lot of paths, it sometimes feels like I as in Harshit have to play 10 different characters for 10 different roles. Trying to keep it as real as possible helps in achieving such things.
There are always a lot of questions people ask me as to how I play chess at the national level and at the same time handle academics, my research career or just being president of various ipu organizations. To be honest, even I don’t have the answer to it. I guess just enjoying what I do just helps in moving forward. There are days when you don’t want to do anything, there are days when you just want to sleep all day and don’t do anything, on the contrary, there are also days when you can work for 3 days straight with no to 1-2 hour sleep. It is always a roller coaster, to be honest along with a professional career, there are similar roller coasters in personal life as well, being an adult makes you have friendships and sometimes more than that, but such things are good only and only when it pushes you in your career goals or else I am a strong believer that such things, if they pull down your career aspirations then they are worthless things and you have to learn to say ‘no’, something which IPU taught me along the way. If you are a yesman to your friends, seniors etc. you are going to always be pulled down by them and won’t be able to have an independent career something which I also see in a lot of my peers.
It is still surreal to look at what has happened in the past 4 months singularly, from living in an unknown city 2000 km away from home for more than a month to pursue your research aspirations to being ranked 3rd all over the nation in national chess tournament sponsored by kingfisher broadcasted on television where thousands of players participated and also signing a contract with one of the biggest esports company of India to having back to back events as Srijan science club president to having built a car to represent my university in IIT Bombay to winning and participating in a lot of quizzes all over India to a lot more which I can’t even remember happened in the past months. These past months, talking to a lot of people successful in life, walking and getting guidance from a lot of people at 5 am on the campus just makes me so lucky to have an opportunity to atleast have a chance to live this life.
I still don’t know what all is written for the next 8 months and the rest of the working stage of my life, but safe to say, it is going to be epic. Living by one of the quotes said by one of my inspirations, “I have lost my mind to this like Vincent van Gogh lost his mind to his art when my mother will have a huge mansion to live in, my significant other would have a different car for every day of the week and my kids’ kids will have everything they ever wanted, it will be then worth it”.
Proud of you beta! Hope your dreams become reality. Onwards and upwards.