He beat some of the world’s top players despite growing up with little access to chess books and not having the same knowledge his rivals possessed.

In July 1929, 12 chess players gathered at Chatham House School, a venerable institution in Ramsgate, England, to contest the British championship. The field included several well-known masters, as well as one player who stood out from the rest because he was not from England, but from the jewel of the British Empire: India.

His name was Sultan Khan.

It is doubtful that the other competitors knew much about him, and they probably did not regard him as much of a threat. At the time, Europe was the center of the chess world, and though Khan had won the All-India Championship the year before, it was most likely against an inferior level of competition compared with what he would face in the upcoming tournament.

In addition, there were differences in the rules of chess played on the subcontinent. For example, pawns could not move two squares on their first turn, and there was no similar rule for castling. Instead, on one move during the game, the king could move like a knight. The need to adjust to how the game was played in Europe gave Khan ‌a significant handicap‌, particularly in the early phase of games‌.

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Growing up in India under British rule, Khan also had little or no access to chess books, so he knew next to nothing about the theory of how to begin games — knowledge that his rivals possessed.

None of that stopped him. Khan won the championship convincingly, recording victories in more than half his games while losing only once. This marked the beginning of a whirlwind period of four years in which Khan competed against the world’s best players and more than held his own.Despite his first name, Khan was not royalty. According to a 2020 article by Ather Sultan, his oldest son, and Atiyab Sultan, one of his granddaughters, written for the Pakistani news site Dawn, Khan was born in 1903 (some other sources say 1905) in Khushab, a town in the Punjab region of modern-day Pakistan. His family were landowners and pirs, or Sufi religious guides.

Khan learned to play chess from his father, Mian Nizam Din, when he was young, and he was the best player in Punjab by the time he was 21. A wealthy landowner, Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, hired him to develop a chess team, for which he received a monthly stipend and room and board. When Sir Umar went to live in London in 1929 so he could attend the Round Table Conferences for parliamentary reform in India, Khan went with him.

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The great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) contemplated the question of what could be the measure of a life well lived in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year.]

In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the flower of his youth at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three grandparents all lived to be over eighty. Of remoter ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off. A great-grandmother of mine, who was a friend of Gibbon, lived to the age of ninety-two, and to her last day remained a terror to all her descendants. My maternal grandmother, after having nine children who survived, one who died in infancy, and many miscarriages, as soon as she became a widow devoted herself to women’s higher education. She was one of the founders of Girton College, and worked hard at opening the medical profession to women. She used to tell of how she met in Italy an elderly gentleman who was looking very sad. She asked him why he was so melancholy and he said that he had just parted from his two grandchildren. ‘Good gracious,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have seventy-two grandchildren, and if I were sad each time I parted from one of them, I should have a miserable existence!’ ‘Madre snaturale!,’ he replied. But speaking as one of the seventy-two, I prefer her recipe. After the age of eighty she found she had some difficulty in getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3 a.m. in reading popular science. I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was growing old. This, I think, is the proper recipe for remaining young. If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective, you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.

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By Rebecca Solnit

A monastic once told me renunciation can be great if it means giving up things that make you miserable.

This vision, I think, is what has been missing when we talk about the climate crisis — and how we should respond to it.

Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?

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Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.

Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A “world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests.”

Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, turned Moscow into its largest oil supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West. Far from apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked.

“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call it out.”

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