Reportage: Bijoy Venugopal. Photograph: S K Kotian

“It’s a Najdorf Sicilian opening,” says Anish, referring to the arrangement of chessmen before him. Seated opposite him, Atish looks intently at the chequered board.

“There’s something about these two,” says Himanshu, his voice dropping by a conspiring decibel. “They can play blind chess. Once I was on a train to Bangalore with them and they were bored, so they closed their eyes and began to play!”

On a typical day in the hostel Anish would sleep at 1 or 2 am. “Unless we were up watching movies on our computers,” he says. His favourite film is Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. “I also like [Ron Howard’s] A Beautiful Mind about a Nobel Laureate [John Forbes Nash] and [the Michael Douglas-Val Kilmer-Om Puri starrer] The Ghost And The Darkness about two lions.”

He and his friends also watched a lot of Hindi movies on VCD, but he has no clear favourites. “I just watch them for those three hours and then forget about them!” he says.