The Chess Olympiad at Mamallapuram, Chennai has, if nothing else, has exalted the Tamil language.

The whole Chennai city is plastered with a Knight – more like a two legged centaur dressed in a Tamil traditional Dhoti! Whoever had conceived of this as an icon for the Chess Olympiad has definitely interwoven the Tamil tradition into the game of Chess.

Napier Bridge is chequered in black and white squares, that while driving over the bridge one wonders if the moves of the tyres of the car are legal, as it moves even through stranger squares than that of the knight on Chess board.

If exalting one language over other Scheduled languages of the Nation has become the priority at the expense of the consolidated fund of India, surely the Governments which run the List 2 of Schedule 7, should be given the same leeway. Accordingly, it all balances out that the Chess Olympiad in Chennai has no place for any other schedule language except English and Tamil (at least the cut outs I’ve seen would bear me out)!

Tamil Nadu has interesting outcomes. I asked a half literate person who this Dhoti clad horse was?

Sir, That is CHESS ROWTHER!

That more or less sums up the deeper understanding of even the half literate guys in Tamil Nadu! The guy has heard about or had seen Chess being played and with a Dhoti, he doesn’t call it a seahorse instead calls him a ‘Rowther’- who were the traditional Arabian horse dealers in the south, since the times of Krishna Deva Raya! Amusingly appropriate.