Parimarjan Negi
Currently the youngest grandmaster in the world, Parimarjan Negi (14) has come a long way since EducationWorld wrote him up on this page two years ago (EW February 2005). Since then as he predicted, he has not only claimed the youngest grandmaster title, but is also the second youngest to do so in the history of chess. But breaking records of this mind game is hardly a novel experience for this young grandmaster.In July 2005, he became the youngest international master ever when he earned his third and final IM norm at the Sort International open chess tournament in Spain. A year later in July 2006, at age 13 he qualified as the second youngest international grandmaster in the history of the game (after Sergey Karjakin), when he earned his third and final GM norm at the Chelyabinsk Region Superfinal Championship in Satka, Russia, displacing Pentala Harikrishna as the country’s youngest ever GM and improving upon Viswanathan Anand’s 14-year-old record of 18 years and 19 days.
"Vishwanathan Anand remains my inspiration and role model. He counsels and encourages me whenever we meet," says Parimarjan, who is working hard to earn the Super Grandmaster title by crossing the ELO rating of 2,600 against his current rating of 2,538.
A runner up (prize money: Rs.2 lakh) at the recently held Amity Grandmaster Challenge in Delhi, where 2005 European women’s champion Kateryna Lahno won, Parimarjan was initiated in this mind sport at the age of four and won his first title at age six. "A family friend gifted him a chess board. The rest is history," says his father, J. B. Singh Negi, a senior traffic controller with the Airports Authority of India.
"I started playing for fun but when prizes, titles and events started coming my way, I started serious coaching," recalls Parimarjan, who now has foreign coaches and even a yoga teacher apart from the full support of his family and teachers of the Amity International School, Saket. Obliged to miss classes when playing in tournaments in India and abroad (he has already played in 16 countries), he is helped out by his teachers and friends who provide supplementary tuition and photocopies of notes.
It’s not just family and the school who are piloting his success in this strenous mind game. The Tata Group has chipped in with travel and other expenses. It’s this triology of industry, academics and parents who are behind the astonishing success of the world’s youngest chess grandmaster who has done India proud.
Autar Nehru (New Delhi)
Shweta Sharma
At an age when most youngsters are content watching movies, Lucknow-based aspirant business management student Shweta Sharma (18) has made her own. Her 14-minute Darpan (mirror) is an anti-tobacco documentary born out of her despair of several nears and dears succumbing to the temptation of the evil weed with disastrous consequences.
"The objective of Darpan is to alert the public to the dangers of tobacco promotion, tobacco hazards, cigarette advertising, and violations of The Cigarette and other Tobacco Products Act 2003, in India. There are parallels between the deceptive product promotion strategies adopted by alcohol majors despite a blanket ban on advertising of alcohol, and of tobacco products," says Sharma.
The stimulus to produce the documentary came from the monthly anti-tobacco lectures and poster competitions organised at the Dominic Savio School, Lucknow where she was a student. Bobby Ramakant, an active anti-tobacco campaigner and correspondent of the Health and Development Network, a non-profit organisation registered as a company in the Republic of Ireland, trained Sharma in the basics of video recording and also took her to slums and railway platforms where the worst horrors of young people with tobacco addiction could be witnessed.
One month of training later, during which Sharma researched anti-tobacco legislation and the proven link between smoking and lung cancer, she penned a script. The documentary was shot using a borrowed digital camera capable of recording for only 30 seconds at a stretch. "So every time I would shoot for a few seconds, rush to load the footage onto my laptop and then shoot some more," she recalls. Darpan was completed in March and screened in schools, slums and railway platforms.
When she isn’t shooting documentaries or agitating against tobacco consumption, Sharma prepares for admission into a bachelor of business administration programme. In the longer term she entertains ambitions of a career in the film industry. "Films have a vast reach and they have great potential in conveying socially beneficial messages," she opines.
Her faith in the film medium as a driver of change is hardly surprising. Her father Pratap Narain Sharma, an avid smoker for years, kicked the habit after viewing Darpan.
Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)