Play the Move First

Kasparov the chess master was a fiercely aggressive player.

After a hard loss, when the room had narrowed and the coffee had gone quiet on the table, someone asked him how he would walk into the next game with his belief shaken, and Garry, without reaching for drama or speeches, said he would simply play the moves he would play if he were confident, and then let the feeling take its time to catch up.

It wasn’t theatre; it was a way back to himself, the small rituals of returning: sit a touch taller, let the breath lengthen, choose the assertive line that belongs to your best day, and trust that the board will begin to answer, because one firm choice steadies the next, and across the table the air slowly changes, almost like weather turning after rain.

I think about this often, how we keep waiting for confidence to arrive with perfect timing like a polite guest, when on most days it wanders in late, and only after we have begun, and how this is not a flaw in us but simply the way things are when life is real and work is honest.

Each of us faces our own boards, the meeting where a quiet knot sits under the ribs, the page that will not soften no matter how long we look at it, the call that has lived so long in our mind that it has become a shadow on the wall, and we tell ourselves that we will begin when we feel ready, though readiness, more often than not, is not a feeling at all, but a posture we can choose, a small honest act we can take, the way we place our hands on the desk, the tone of the first sentence we allow ourselves to write.

Begin there: write the email you would write if you trusted your voice, ask the plain question that keeps circling the room, open the document and add one clear paragraph instead of trying to finish the whole chapter, and make the next right move.

Let your world help you: clear a little space on the desk, pour a glass of water, give yourself ten unbroken minutes with the door closed, and speak to yourself the way you would speak to a tired friend on a difficult morning, gently, without judgment, yet with a quiet expectation that you will do one thing that matters.

In time, something turns: the noise eases its grip, the work feels lighter in the hands, the path across the board opens a little at a time, and your fingers remember what to do, not because fear has vanished, but because you chose to act from the place you wished to stand, and by holding that place with patience, you invited your steadier self to take the chair and stay.

A Great Quote

“nspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy; it comes to the one who has already opened the notebook, cleared a small space on the table, and begun to work in quiet faith.” — Sarb Randhawa.

Book Review: Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra by Ruskin Bond

There are books you read, and there are books you live in for a while. This one feels like the second kind. You move through it the way you might walk through an old town at dusk, half in the present, half in the lanes of memory, knowing that something precious has already passed and yet is still somehow here.

This book is made of small things: schooldays and sleepy afternoons, rented rooms, busy bazaars, hill paths, railway platforms, the stubborn presence of trees that refuse to forget. The stories circle around one place and one life, but they never feel narrow, because they carry the weight of growing up, moving away, and coming back to find that the world has changed in quiet but painful ways. Shops are replaced, houses pulled down, people move on or disappear, yet the trees stand as if holding a promise on our behalf.

What stayed with me most was not any single incident, but the mood that runs through the pages: a gentle, unhurried look at loss that does not complain, a gratitude for the ordinary, a love for people who were never famous but were part of the sky of one person’s life. There is no big speech about memory or belonging; instead, we see it in a boy watching a hillside, in a man returning to a town that no longer knows his name, in the quiet knowledge that childhood cannot be reclaimed, only honoured.

This book reminds you that the real landmarks of a life are not events but corners: a certain tree outside a house, a verandah where someone once waited for you, a road you walked every day without thinking it would one day vanish. It is a soft nudge to look again at the streets you pass through now, the people who share your days, and to understand that even if the outer city changes, some part of it goes on growing inside you, like those trees in Dehra, patient and still, holding your past without making a fuss.

P.S.: If this newsletter brought you calm, pass it on to someone who’d enjoy the silence too.

About : Every two weeks, I sit at my desk and write a small letter, the kind you might open in the middle of a busy day when you need to breathe for a moment. Inside are simple reflections on how we change and grow, a line or two that stays with you for a while and a book that has helped me see things with softer eyes. Think of it less as a publication and more as a letter with the kind of words that steady us when the world moves too fast.