if only for a time machine
I went back to Fabiano Caruana and Cristina Chirila's outstanding YouTube channel, C-Squared, to find their first interview of Danya. I had never seen that one before, and watching it now fills me with equal parts exhilaration and despair.
The hosts are both GMs, with of course Caruana being one of the very top chess players in the whole world at present (and arguably top 10 of all time in my book); and this chess podcast has always been a fave of mine for some time now. Chirila is a very thoughtful and engaging interviewer, and Fabi is just sheer layered brilliancies [chess pun ::chuckle:: and also punning here a tribute to Danya] on chess history and analysis, as well as uncommon insight into chess and human psychology.
Anyway, I posted a comment on this 3-year old video, as follows:
If only you guys had a Time Machine, you could then go back and warn Danya of what was to come… and perhaps he’d then have a true fighting chance to thwart the monstrous thing coming his way, with preparation and foresight. It’s painfully clear now that he was blindsided by the whole grotesquerie that was the Kramnik defilement which at the end of the day, as we now tragically know, Danya succumbed to.
The only way this can be made right is if real consequences are to be levied against Naroditsky’s tormentor. Then, Danya’s untimely death will not have been for nothing.
If a random generally non-interactive internet entity such as I am commenting on posts like this, then hopefully there is an unusual groundswell all around on this topic, hence a broader visibility on it be cast -- such that FIDE will move and do the right thing here.
I'm not that hopeful it will, as they strike me as a craven bunch of orthodoxniks who would prefer to sweep this issue under the rug, as they already have over these past couple of years.
We shall see. I, and perhaps more than a few randos, will be watching.