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.

There are some aspects of work you need to keep working on and no matter what environment you are in. Continuous learning is very important. It's what I call 'competitive tension', which is about having a competition around.

You bring to chess facets of your personality and what you are. I have interests other than chess, like music and world and current affairs. I also have many friends around the world with whom I like to keep in touch.

We want more women players to take up chess. There are few participants at the national level and hope it will grow.

It is very difficult to play a single blitz game! You want to play for a long time. So I tend not to do that anymore.

In the knockout tournaments, it's futile to prepare for a grand finale. You may have worked out many strategies for the final. But you may lose in the first round itself.

I think the draw quotient has always been high in world championship matches because the amount of effort people put into neutralizing each other's openings. It's just now with computers that it has reached a new level.