When I started out playing chess as a kid I thought I should be world champion. As a kid you have no idea what that means and you only sort of picture it. It is hard to imagine that I waited all those years and it happened in a late stage of my career.

I feel that schools and corporates should help the government in popularising sports in the country. Blaming the government for every sporting debacle will not be fair.

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.

Each match I play is the most important one yet.

Intuition in chess can be defined as the first move that comes to mind when you see a position.

Grandmasters decline with age. That's a given. There is nothing special about the age of 40, but age eventually takes its toll. That much is clear. Beyond that it's about how long you can put off the effects and compensate for them. Mistakes will crop in but you try to compensate for them with experience and hard work.

You need to motivate yourself, no matter what-definitely when things are bad, but also when things are good. Or else, you risk becoming complacent.