Darpan Inani sits across his opponent, and a customised chess board separates them. While he waits for his opponent to announce his move, he has already visualised the chess board and pieces in his mind, and once his opponent declares his move, the visual will change in an instant!
Darpan is India’s highest-rated visually impaired chess player, and competes against sighted champions!
“I chose to play chess because this is the only sport that can be played by a visually impaired person against a sighted person,” Darpan told The Better India, adding that “Although blind chess has been in existence for about 20 years now, I wanted to compete against sighted opponents.”
Darpan’s life is sure to inspire you. At the age of three years, Darpan was diagnosed with the Stevens-Johnson syndrome and lost his eyesight completely.
For the next six years, he would spend a majority of his time in hospitals, and underwent over 50 surgeries.
The doctors, like Darpan and his family, were hoping that his visual impairment could be reversed. But that was not to be.
When he was eight years old, Darpan got admitted in a regular school. “In the sports hour, all my friends would run to the ground to play games like kho-kho, Kabaddi etc. I obviously could not compete with them. That’s when my parents and I discovered that I could play chess when my friends were busy with other sports,” he says.
The only thing that differentiates Darpan from any other chess player is that he uses a special board—one with holes in every square and nails on every piece. This prevents the pieces from falling when the players touch them to check their position.
“But chess has time constraints, so I refrain from touching the pieces to check their positions every time,” Darpan told TBI. How then, does he keep the game going?
“Well, when the game starts, I imagine the picture of the board with the pieces. As it progresses, my opponent announces every move, and I visualise the pieces accordingly. A move of ‘rook to E6’ changes the visualisation in my mind, but since some games can go up to 5 hours, I touch the pieces to check the position sometimes,” Darpan says.