Photo for representational purpose.
Credit: iStock photo
If one walks down the narrow lanes of Amritsar, you may hear a man chiseling away at wood, attempting to mould it into something new.
With the utmost patience and delicacy, he will chose the best pieces and start carving at them to make it one the strongest pieces on the 12 squared board
It is both funny and baffling how people hailing from two varied places with no straight line to connect can still cross each other's path one day. The same is true for D Gukesh and man called Baljit Singh.
According to a report by Indian Express, the pieces that Singh chiseled way at in his shop at Amritsar, were the very same which were used on the chess board when Gukesh was declared the World Chess Champion.
Singh's craft is not only difficult but rare as well. He is one of the few craftsmen in the world entrusted with carving the knight for the world championship sets.
The knight is the most difficult piece to carve.
However, when he learned about his pieces being used in the highly-awaited chess match, it neither excited nor shocked him.
He told the paper, “I’ve been doing this work since 1990, so naturally, I’ve produced a lot of pieces. My team and I produce about 40 knights a week, for many sets in many designs, so I can’t keep track of the final use of each one of them,”
Global chess’s governing body, FIDE, sold the World Championship’s rights to Andrew Paulson in 2011 an American entrepreneur.
In order the start afresh, Paulson engaged services of a design firm known as Pentagram. Pentagram forwarded the task to a man named Daniel Weil. It was Weil's duty to redesign the chess sets.
In a Eurkea moment, it struck him that it would be both prudent and economical to find a shop in Amritsar to reinvent the chess board.
Amritsar has a legacy of manufacturing chess boards which began in the 19th century with ivory trade.
Aditya Chopra, the owner of the chess shop where Baljit works told the publication, “My father started this business. Being in this industry, when he travelled abroad he realised that there would be great demand for Indian chess sets because these were made of wood, while other sets were mainly plastic, or in the case of pricier ones, made of marble. That’s how this started."
However, making the chess pieces requires immense skill and precision. Different types of wood is stored and aged out in a warehouse. Only then, it is cleaned, cut, shaped, polished, and then hand-carved.
Moreover, during the carving process all pieces must be identical to another without a fault. If any piece has the slightest of variation, it is cast out.