FOR A CRACKDOWN ON THE INDUSTRY
All the India team juniors are monstrously good fast players, with Nihal Sarin having beaten Magnus Carlsen
The NCB’s campaign against the alleged drug peddlers involved in Sushant’s case began on August 28 when they apprehended Abbas Ramzan Ali Lakhani with 46 grams of marijuana in Kurla, who then identified Karan Arora as the seller. The latter was apprehended from Chandivali with 13 grams of marijuana. The premises of Zaid Vilatra, another supplier, was searched on September 1, based on information given by Lakhani and Arora. Vilatra, in turn, named Abdel Basit Parihar as the receiver of the drugs.
In a remand application filed before the additional chief metropolitan judge on September 6, seeking Sawant’s custody, the NCB tried to build connections between Parihar and Showik. According to them, Parihar would procure drugs from Vilatra and one Kaizan Ebrahim on Showik’s instructions, which would then be delivered to Miranda or Sawant. Ebrahim was the one found to be in possession of 5 grams of hashish/ charas. On September 7, the NCB also arrested Anuj Keshwani, whom Ebrahim named as his supplier. Interestingly, the NCB did not seek Ebrahim’s custody. The court has granted him bail. The NCB arrested Sawant on September 5. ‘It is clear from his [Sawant’s] statement and electronic evidence gathered by the NCB that he’s an active member of a drug syndicate connected with high-society personalities and drug suppliers,’ says the application. Mutha Ashok Jain, deputy director, NCB, says they will make the accused confront each other to get more details. “We get 60 days to file a chargesheet in small cases and six months in big cases. We’ll take the case to its logical conclusion.”
According to a senior police officer who has dealt with narcotics cases, it will be difficult to prove Showik or Rhea’s involvement in the drug case unless the drugs are found in their possession. The NCB, though, is confident of the case it has built so far. Its confidence comes from the provision in the NDPS Act which states that it is a crime to be engaged in the production, manufacturing, possession, sale, purchase, transportation, warehousing, concealment, use or consumption, import inter-state, export inter-state, import into India, export from India or transhipment, of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances. The Act also provides for rigorous imprisonment of up to six months and a fine of Rs 10,000 in cases of small quantity (up to 2 grams) narcotics substances. The punishment goes up to 10 years of imprisonment in case of larger quantities (more than 2 grams).
The case took an interesting turn on September 7 when Rhea filed an FIR at the Bandra police station against Sushant’s sister Priyanka Tanwar and Dr Tarun Kumar of Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital for forgery and sending a bogus medical prescription that showed Sushant consulting in the outpatient department when he was in Mumbai. The FIR states that the prescription contained medicines prohibited under the NDPS Act and which, if administered without proper supervision, could cause a chronic anxiety attack. Maneshinde says Rhea left Sushant’s house on June 8, the same day he ignored her advice to consult a doctor before taking the medicines. “The cocktail of illegally administered medicines and drugs may have led to Sushant’s suicide. His sisters need to be answerable to the investigators and God,” he says. The case of Sushant’s death was transferred from the Mumbai Police to the CBI on the Supreme Court’s order on August 19. Considering this, Rhea’s FIR, says Vikas Singh, Sushant’s family’s lawyer, is in violation of the Supreme Court order. “If she had bonafide intentions, she should have mentioned what she has stated in the FIR in her statement to the CBI,” says Singh.
The investigators believe that admission of administering drugs won’t be enough to prosecute Rhea on charges of abetment to suicide. The CBI will have to prove the drugs aggravated Sushant’s mental illness. The report by the doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on the examination of Sushant’s viscera is awaited. If the report finds any poisonous substance that might have resulted from the drugs in his viscera, it will spell trouble for Rhea. If traces of poison are found without links to drugs, she might claim innocence as she was not the last person to have met him. If the viscera report does not mention poisoning, then the theory that Sushant was murdered will collapse. Until then, Rhea awaits her fate in Byculla jail. The ongoing battle to prove her innocence has become that much more difficult for the 28-year-old actress. ■
THE ONLINE CHESS TOURNAMENT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A DRAW WITH RUSSIA, BUT THERE’S NO DENYING INDIA’S RICH CROP OF TALENT WHEN IT COMES TO CHESS
SIDDHANT JUMDE
The Indian team scored gold at the Online Chess Olympiad under strange circumstances. It is the first time India has won gold at an Olympiad— the previous best performance was a bronze in 2014 under very different conditions. The final between Russia and India had to be written off due to a massive internet outage on Sunday, August 31, making it impossible to connect to the host website, Chess.com. After some cogitation, the World Chess Federation president Arkady Dvorkovich awarded gold to both teams. The Russians were unhappy. They had, in technical terms, won. The Indians were unhappy because they felt robbed by the outage. Both teams took the medals, though, of course! In this event, from quarter final onwards, the knockouts were played as best of two matches on six boards, with a single game tiebreaker, if necessary. The first match of the final had been drawn 3-3 and the peace treaty had been signed on three boards in the second match. Two of the three live games seemed headed for draws. Divya Deshmukh had a winning position in the third game. If normal service had continued, the Indians were confident that she would have won and India would have taken gold, fair and square. But web infrastructure provider Cloudflare went down, making Chess.com unreachable. The Indians lost connectivity to the site first, which meant they lost all three games. But everyone on the Indian side could prove they had live internet connections. It was Chess.com that was unreachable.
Simply getting to the finals was an incredible saga for a 12-person team spread across locations. Players were logging in from Prague, Thrissur, Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Nagpur,
Nashik, Viyayawada, Hyderabad, etc. After a debacle against Mongolia, where Vidit Gujrathi and Koneru Humpy were timed out due to disconnections, the Indians deployed a lot of technical wizardry, to ensure seamless connectivity.
The chess Olympiad is a biennial event involving several thousand pawn-pushers. The last one in September-October 2018 was held in Batumi, Georgia. It saw 336 teams from 180 countries playing in Open and Women’s sections.
This online tournament was organised by the World Chess Federation (Fide) when it became obvious that the 2020 Olympiad would be cancelled. The Online Olympiad format is six-player matches. There was a league stage followed by knockouts involving the top eight teams. India nearly got knocked out at the league stage. The disconnections meant a draw against Mongolia while the team was coasting to easy victory. The Indians fought back with three “must-win” victories, beating strong teams in Germany, Georgia and, finally, upsetting world champions China.
The “luck of the Net” favoured India in the quarters vs Armenia. Five games in the first match had been drawn and Nihal Sarin had a small edge against his Armenian opponent when the Armenian lost connectivity. The Armenians appealed and withdrew in protest when the appeal was rejected.
The semi-final was a thriller. Poland beat India in the first match. But India broke back to win the second match, taking it to the tiebreaker. There, Humpy checkmated Monika Socko with seconds to spare in an Armageddon game (in which white gets five minutes, black gets four minutes but black gets draw-odds and is awarded the win if the game is drawn).
India’s extra impetus came from the format. The top two boards were handled by top grandmasters including former world champion, Viswanathan Anand, top 100 players like Gujrathi (the playing captain), Pentala Harikrishna and rising star Aravindh Chithambaram. But that strength could be matched or exceeded by powerhouse
teams like Russia and China.
However, two boards had to field women, and two others had to field players under 20, one of each gender. India’s strength was on those four boards. The women’s squad included Humpy and Harika Dronavalli—both top 10 players and grandmasters. They were backed by woman grandmaster Bhakti Kulkarni and woman international master Rameshbabu Vaishali, 19, a world age-group champion.
The junior boards featured age-group world champions and prodigies in grandmasters Nihal Sarin (16) and Praggnanandhaa (15), and women international masters Divya Deshmukh (14) and Vantika Agrawal (18). All the juniors are monstrously good fast players, with Sarin recently beating reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen at fast play. India has a huge presence in age-group chess, with 10 grandmasters who aren’t eligible to vote and 14 players in the top 100. On the girls’ side as well, there are 13 Indians in the top 100. On those four boards, India had an edge against most teams. Indeed, Praggnanandhaa and Deshmukh generated big scores, while Humpy and Dronavalli both won when the chips were down.
The team also had phenomenal support. More than 69,000 Indians logged into Chess.com for the finals and thousands of others watched it on other websites. The Olympiad was a internet event, with stand-up comic Samay Raina and cricketer Yuzvendra Chahal—a former national U-12 chess champion—involved in webcasts that regularly drew massive audiences. The successful campaign could mean even more youngsters entering the game and a higher profile, with more sponsorship and government support.
—Devangshu Datta
by Parul Sharma `2,995; 156 pages
DIALECTS OF SILENCE Delhi Under Lockdown
is not everyday that you get to be in the amphitheatre of history. These months of lockdown will be the subject of stories and narratives of how a tiny virus brought an entire planet to a standstill. These visuals of dystopian emptiness will forever be recorded in our minds. Visions of our cities turned into ghostly habitats, surreal and harrowingly beautiful at the same time. They exerted a pull on the photographer, like the that of the full moon on tides.
This urge to go out and capture the ‘desolate beauty’ of Delhi under lockdown compelled Parul Sharma, a successful corporate world dropout turned photographer, to step out of her locked-down life—leaving behind her “good family time”, Netflix and evenings of wine and champagne— to record her city as “never seen before”. The images she captured on the streets of Delhi during this time make up her book of photographs, Dialects of Silence.
Sharma was initially drawn to the immense beauty of it all. A city reduced to its pure architecture. Bereft of its milling crowds and sludge of traffic. “It became a city of light and shade, graphic forms against dramatic blue skies,” she says. The city transformed into the “Delhi of the 1950s”, as seen in the sepiatinted pictures that hung in the home of her grandparents in Chandni Chowk and her paternal home in Lutyens’ Delhi, forever etched in her memory.
Armed with her phone camera, she drove on roads “taken over by dogs and monkeys”, creating images of a lifeless symmetry, beautiful yet surreal. With the explosion of the migrant crisis, she found herself capturing humane portraits of migrants trapped in the city. When people began dying of Covid, she landed at the Nigambodh Ghat where, on seeing a lonely body placed for cremation on the wooden cart, she “froze”—it was her first encounter with death during the crisis. “Wrapped in plastic and sheets, the body almost looked like an Amazon package,” says Sharma, recalling “the dehumanisation of the bodies” of Covid patients, cremated without the presence of family members.
When the thought of exposure to the virus made her feel like giving up, her husband Tony offered moral support. “You always wanted to be a war photographer, this is war,” he told her, urging her to go on. Sharma then began documenting the fight against the virus at the primary frontier—Covid wards. Here, from the sidelines of the epic struggle against the virus, she captured the humanity of the doctors and health workers. Dialects of Silence is a significant testimony to an epochal tragedy of our times. In the fairly comprehensive sweep of all it records, it admirably reflects the photographer’s honesty, using the lens to “acquire” beauty in all its shades—graphic, stark and humane.
—Bandeep Singh