Thoughts on Game 2 of the World Chess Championship (2010)

"Strong contradiction which ruins all the illusions," said GM Sergei Shipov after Chess World Champion GM Viswanathan Anand played his knight to b4. With that, the overly aggressive and hence unsound play of the challenger, GM Veselin Topalov, was refuted.

In life, sometimes our views of reality can be rudely exposed as illusions. Moses was a murderer (and kept that tendency even after 'Thou shalt not murder' was given to him), David was a cunning physicist who wrote psychopathic lines into his psalms, Abraham (as mentioned before in several posts) was a ruthless warlord. Newton was a mystic, Einstein was religious, Hawking is afraid of aliens.

The bare facts are incontrovertible in each case. Yet the mythic versions of our own narratives continue to compel. Until, of course, 'strong contradiction ruins all the illusions.'