I attend to my fitness. I go the gym every day and try to maintain my physical fitness; without that, it is tough to take challenges on the chess board.

I think an important lesson from the game is that once you have made a move, you cannot take it back. You really have to measure your decisions. You think a lot. You evaluate your choices very carefully. There's never any guarantee about what's going to follow once you have made a decision.

When I was about six, I saw my elder siblings play chess and pestered my mother into teaching me. Very soon, I was beating everyone at home, and they thought it would be good to join a club. So my sister would take me to the Tal chess club on Thursdays and weekends.

Nowadays, when you're not a grandmaster at 14, you can forget about it

Each match I play is the most important one yet.

The Internet gives you access to a lot of material, and it's fun to sit and read. I go to something like Wikipedia and look at different topics... I find the subject fascinating. I like to read about concepts and mathematicians.

I was very lucky that while I was a chess player in a country where chess was not a big deal, I happened to be in the one city where there was a sprouting chess team: Chennai.