THINK blog Volume 2 Chapter 8

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Not long ago I visited Zanzibar. Having nothing better to do one afternoon I visited a local school and offered to give a sort of guest lecture, reasoning that the kids might benefit from hearing the English of a native speaker. The teacher to whom I made this proposal politely informed me that it would be better if I made some sort of donation, something that I was in no position to provide. Rather than teaching anyone, I learned something that day. Even if my lesson had been a success, it would have undermined what the resident teachers were tasked with doing, and in a reversal of the dynamic certainly no teacher from Zanzibar would have been allowed access to pupils in a UK school. If I were any teacher at all, I would have grasped this without needing it spelled out to me.

Nevertheless, I tutor occasionally and I coach very occasionally and in what are almost the words of the late Bill Hicks I feel it is my duty to pass on information at all times so that we can all learn, evolve and escape this planet.

President Kennedy famously tried to endear himself to his audience by saying Ich bin ein berliner. As a thought experiment, just imagine German politician visiting England -- at any point in history -- and giving a speech entirely in German, save for the immortal line 'I am a doughnut'. Leaving aside power dynamics however, there is a lesson here about getting the basics right. The difference between перегрузка (overload) and перезагрузка (reload, reboot, reset) was highlighted by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton in particular. With the benefit of hindsight, Philip Short's biography of Vladimir Putin questions whether such a fundamental error in translating (and transliterating) a single word -- reset -- could have been unintentional. Judge for yourselves.

Whether or not it is the case in life or diplomacy, in chess it surely is the case that if you get the basics right the rest will follow.