My job was basically to be a delivery boy for all kinds of things, but they also — because I was at Georgetown and studying international affairs, I was assigned to read six newspapers a day and clip the most relevant articles. This is the technology we used. You couldn’t scan articles. There was no “online.” There was nothing, right? So I would read the newspapers, clip the articles I thought they ought to read, put them on a routing slip, which had on it the names of the senior staff of the committee and all the senators who were committee members. And I would send it to the senior staff, and they would decide whether to send any of them on, but I don’t think I’d have won a Rhodes Scholarship if I hadn’t been a clerk on the Foreign Relations Committee. Nobody else I was competing with read six newspapers a day, and they actually paid me good money to read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Star, which existed then, The Baltimore Sun , The St. Louis Post Dispatch , and then we alternated — and — oh, and The Wall Street Journal . We read them every day. Those were the six papers we read. I did, and then that’s what the senators got.

When I started getting my first fan letters, I made a point to try to respond to every single one. The wins always felt that much more special because I knew I was making so many people happy. And losses hurt that much worse because I truly was invested in not wanting to disappoint those who supported my side. But more than anything, I always appreciated the fact so many fans invested their emotions in my performance.

In the last 24 years that I have played for India I have made new friends, and before that I have had friends from my childhood. They have all had a terrific contribution. As and when I have called them to come and bowl to me at the nets, they have left their work aside to come and help me. Be it joining me on holidays and having discussions with me on cricket, or how I was a little stressed and wanting to find a solution so I can perform better. All those moments my friends were with me. Even for when I was injured, I would wake up in the morning because I couldn't sleep and thought that my career was over because of injuries, that is when my friends have woken up at 3 o'clock in the morning to drive with me and make me believe that my career was not over. Life would be incomplete without all those friends.

I think chess — actually, a number of things that I learned when I was young — it wasn't so much the chess itself; it was the skills that you were training while you were playing chess. So problem-solving, imagination, creative thinking, strategic thinking, all of these things — if you play chess to a high level, what you're really honing is those meta-skills. And I realized from quite young, that's one of the reasons I liked chess was this is a great practice for me to get good — sort of like a mental gym, if you like — to get really good at those other skills, which you could then translate to all sorts of other subjects like science or business.