Chess. The ultimate meeting of minds where competitors joust together, face to face across the 64 squares of the Chess Board, the panoply to encapsulate the unspoken nobility of competition in the time honoured tradition until the loser is vanquished.
There was an Indian kid in my school who was brilliant and virtually unbeatable so he is either a highly successful managing director somewhere or planning to take over the world which is why the Taliban have banned Chess in Afghanistan.Actually they have banned it due to concerns over gambling which is against it's very strictly adhered to Islamic law but that didn't make such a good opening paragraph but Chess does have a history of being played by some of history's very worse such as Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi even though apparently he wasn't very good and when he played the Chess President, the Pres said he held back and offered a diplomatic draw because: 'Winning on a visit would be embarrassing' which was probably a very wise move.
Other despots and mass murderers include Stalin, Menachem Begin, Napoleon, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ivan the Terrible, Franco, Goebbels, Henry VIII, Rudolf Hess, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, William Joyce, Machiavelli, Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Tito, Kaiser Wilhelm, William the Conqueror and Bono of U2.
We were taught Chess in school as we were told it would serve us well in life because it would teach us to think ahead of the possible consequences of our actions but we will never know if someone had hid the chess pieces from a young Adolf and Bono we could have avoided WW2 and the awful Zooropa album but the Taliban could be on to something by banning Chess clubs because whoever the next big bad is, its almost a cert they are currently pondering over whether to take their opponents Bishop or Castling to protect their King.
