The Rediff Interview/ A S Viswanathan

Director special

Shobha Warrier in Chennai

Sixty-eight-year-old A S Viswanathan has just returned to India from Montreal, Canada, after officiating in the World Bridge Championships as one of the directors. A director in a bridge championship can be compared more or less to a referee in football or an umpire in a cricket match though a director has a bigger role. He is responsible for the conduct of the event itself, and is the person who advises the organisers about the format of the tournament and how it should be conducted. Later on, he is also expected to officiate once the tournament begins.

Viswanathan’s achievement becomes more remarkable when we look at the fact that he was the only Asian director in a panel that was dominated by Europeans and Americans. This year, a Hong Kong-based director has entered the group as an apprentice.

In the fifties, as an Aeronautical Mechanical Engineering student at the prestigious Madras Institute of Technology (MIT), Viswanathan developed an interest in bridge after watching his brother-in-law play the game. But little did he realise then that one day, he would be officiating bridge matches at the World Bridge Championships as a director. Bridge was only an interesting pastime for him then; his main interest was, and still is, designing gas turbine aero engines.

But once he started playing at various tournaments, to his surprise and delight, he found that he was winning all of them. But the job he took up in England in the Rolls Royce factory in 1963 was a turning point as far as the game was concerned.

"In those days, Asians were not accepted well into British society. As we worked at Rolls Royce, and we played bridge, myself and my friend, a guy from Orissa, were accommodated into the circuit without much hassle. Still it was difficult to break the Rolls Royce hierarchy. So, I was playing only in the Third Division. Impressed with the way we played, one of the local clubs invited us to play for them, and thus we started playing in the First Division. We won the championship and were selected to play for the county matches regularly for Derbyshire."

When Viswanthan was playing bridge for Derbyshire, S. Venkataraghavan, the off-spinner was playing cricket for the same county. It is interesting to note that while Venkataraghavan became an umpire in cricket, Viswanathan became a director at bridge championships!

"Those were the days computers had not entered bridge tournaments. I found that in the club, many of them could not do the scoring fast while I could do the entire scoring in no time. Before they could do one sheet, I would finish four sheets. So, I slowly started doing the scoring. Soon, they asked me, why don’t you run some games in the evenings? I agreed and that was how the inclination to run an event came about. So, I was playing and running the tournaments virtually every evening. I think that was what helped me become a director.

"Later on, I found that most directors are not good players. While almost all of them are professional directors, I was the only one who took the director’s work as a hobby."

Viswanathan chose to come back to India two years later when he got a job in the Defence R&D in Bangalore, as working for Indian Defence was his dream even as a student. (Here, one must add that the President of India, A.P.J.Abdul Kalam was a year junior to Viswanathan in college and later, they also worked together in Bangalore in the earlier days.)

The opportunity to be a director for the World Bridge Federation came about when the federation organised a seminar and a workshop in Madras in the eighties. The participants were from the zone that included Asia and the Middle East. At the end of the session, the federation conducted a test in which Viswanathan stood first, and that was his first step towards directing major International tournaments like the Bermuda Bowl, Bridge Olympics and World Championships.

Ever since, whenever he could get leave from the office, Viswanathan (better known as Vishy in the bridge circuit) has been officiating as a director in the Bermuda Bowl Championship (Open), the World Olympics (which comes in the year after the Bermuda Bowl) and then the World Bridge Championship. He has been to Lillee, France, Albuquerque, USA and last month to Montreal, Canada, to officiate at the World Championships. But he couldn’t go to the Geneva World Championship as the engine designed by him was being put to test in Bangalore at the same time.

One of the most interesting experiences at Montreal this year was the presence of Bill Gates at the World Championship.

"His presence was a big boost to the game, I must say. He is a reasonably good player, not a very good player as he has started playing only four years ago. But he is very serious about the game. Because of him, the entire world knew that the World Bridge Championship was taking place in Montreal. I found him to be a very simple man, very modest with absolutely no airs at all."

Where does India stand as far as World bridge is concerned?

"Like chess, bridge also is an intellectual game and the difference between chess and bridge is that the permutations and combinations in bridge run into billions. Indians are very good in bridge too but what we lack is the massive experience that the Europeans and the Americans have. Organisational support to a player is much, much more there. Still, India stands in the top ten. This time at the World Championships, four teams from India got into the knock-out stage of 64, and one team got into the last eight. With a bit of luck, they could have gone a bit higher. Yes, winning would have been difficult."

Photographs: Sreeram Selvaraj

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