Aronyak Ghosh, who became India's 95th grandmaster, at the Bangkok Chess Club Open. (Photo: Special arrangement)It’s been just over a decade, but Mrinal Ghosh vividly remembers the years when his family had to resort to selling off ancestral properties to help their son Aronyak chase his dream on the chess board.Those were some of the hardest decisions Mrinal and his wife Sanchita made—after all his son was not even an International Master back then. But when he looks back at them now, Mrinal’s glad he made those tough choices. For, those hard calls, taken by the gut feel of a father, have now given India its 95th grandmaster.The 22-year-old Aronyak became a GM on Sunday at the Bangkok Chess Club Open. While Sanchita, who is a lawyer by profession, was with their son at the tournament, Mrinal, a chess arbiter, was back home, revelling from a distance.Indian chess is littered with tales of parental sacrifices. Some have given up flourishing careers to be full-time chaperones for teenage prodigies. Others have had to dig deep into their savings to punt on their kids. But by any standard, the sacrifices that Aronyak’s parents made to propel him stand out.“We started selling off ancestral properties in 2014 or 2015, when he started to show some promise in chess. Chota-chota karke becha (We sold it little by little). By the time he eventually became an IM, we barely had any savings left,” Mrinal says simply.The properties, in a village called Gangpur in the Hooghly district, were not the only things that were sacrificed for Aronyak’s career.“My mother also took loans on her wedding jewellery,” says Aronyak from Thailand, after earning his third and final GM norm, four years after his first norm came. “We had no other option. If they didn’t do that, I had to stop playing chess.”Story continues below this adThe decisions that his parents were taking to fund his career never escaped Aronyak’s attention even when he was a kid. In fact, they shaped him as a player. It fuelled a different kind of hunger compared to others. Mrinal points out how, since he was a young kid, Aronyak’s focus was always on the prize money on offer, rather than victories or ratings.“Different type ka mentality hai (He has a different type of mentality),” says Mrinal about his son. “By the time he was just 10, he realised that he had to focus on prize money not trophies. Trophies will come.”“Many of his contemporaries like Arjun Erigaisi, Praggnanandhaa shot past him because we didn’t have the funds back in those days to give him good training. We never had any sponsors (besides some help from the HelpChess Foundation),” says Mrinal.Mrinal points out that when the COVID pandemic struck, Aronyak was bringing in 80 per cent of the family’s income by playing in online events.Story continues below this adToday, when Aronyak looks back at his career, particularly the last four years— the ones he dedicated to chasing two remaining grandmaster norms only to miss by the finest of margins at least three or four times—all he can say is that it was a “hell of a ride”.The story of Aronyak’s tryst with chess is also of Mrinal getting reacquainted with a sport he was forced to leave. The tale goes that when Mrinal was a young boy, in Class X back in 1986, he was just getting besotted by the sport and was studying at Alekhine Chess Club when his father suffered a cardiac arrest. In the aftermath, chess took a backseat as family responsibilities took centrestage.“My family members told me to focus on earning money. Chess was not going to do that. Back in those days, even Viswanathan Anand was not a grandmaster,” says Mrinal.What his father’s demise had taken away, his young son had brought back. Mrinal was re-introduced to the sport when a four-year-old Aronyak discovered his childhood chess set. Watching Aronyak make moves with pieces that he had once held, stirred something inside him. In a few months, his own appetite for the sport was reignited and Aronyak’s first tournament experience was as a kid watching his father compete.Story continues below this ad“When Aronyak picked up an interest in playing the sport, I quit so I could focus on his career,” says Mrinal.Over the years, Mrinal has tried a little bit of everything in the sport: he’s currently a FIDE arbiter, but in the past has worked as a chess coach and has organised chess tournaments.“But my best role till date is that of Aronyak Ghosh’s father,” says Mrinal proudly.Amit Kamath is Assistant Editor at The Indian Express and is based in Mumbai. He primarily writes on chess and Olympic sports, and co-hosts the Game Time podcast, a weekly offering from Express Sports. He also writes a weekly chess column, On The Moves. ... Read More © IE Online Media Services Pvt LtdTags:chesschess news