From the archives: Viswanathan Anand, the mover

One morning, in an e-mail, Viswanathan Anand was asked: what was the best thing a parent ever said to you? He wrote back: “Once when I was introducing my parents to a chess aficionado, he told them how my talent was among the world’s greatest. My father replied that it was not chess but being a nice person untouched by fame that made me great. This compliment stays very dear in my memory.”

Individual sport is a self-centred activity, and it follows often that modern champions are happiest in the company of their own reflection. Fame, to be fair, can be exhausting and claustrophic and so wonderfully seductive. Yet with Vishy, never a prisoner of his brilliance, a humanness lingered.

It was the small things. Asking before an interview two years ago, “Can I bring my computer? It will help you understand.” And then arriving, putting his feet up on a friend’s bed and watching Leander Paes play on television. It was walking with his agent Kuruvilla Abraham to a Mercedes hired for them by a sponsor in Delhi, and Abraham saying, “Hell, I would like one of these”, and Viswanathan adding, “Hell, so would I”. It was young players cluttering his inbox with messages, and he, tired, never deleting them but actually answering them. And explaining why: “This is somehow very reassuring. It gives you the feeling that your work is really important. It is a very special feeling to be aware that your moves mean more than just mere results to many people.” Maybe it was his unathleticness for a sportsman, his relative anonymity that he wore with a shrug, that made him seem this regular guy.

When, of course, he clearly was not. He was, if anything, salvation. And here’s why. We had Ramanathan Krishnan and Milkha Singh and Michael Ferreira and Prakash Padukone and Geet Sethi, all world-class heroes in individual sports, except when you looked again, they were (Geet excluded) all gone, heroes in the books. What remained of a billion people was more or less one man (pause and imagine that), a solitary Indian challenger to individual sporting greatness. The chess player, who looks like he hums Bach in his bath, when actually it’s Freddie Mercury.

Child prodigies tend to disappoint, that river of exceptional promise, too often a cheeky stream all puffed up in the monsoon. All sportsmen shine initially, then they plateau—to ascend again, and again, to find new levels, is the laboratory proof of a sportsperson’s calibre. “Improve, invent, practise, persevere,” a voice rebounds inside the skull of the great. At 17, Vishy became a Grandmaster (GM). At 27, he is world No.2. He hears that voice every day. If all sports have an emotional geography, a sort of heart of a game, then for chess it is Russia. To be born there, to be born in India, in just that we see some of Vishy’s uniqueness. In the late ’80s, when he began to advance, India had seven-eight International Masters (IMs) and not a single GM; the Soviet Union had 200 GMs or more. It means the young Russian digests rapidly that first axiom to progress—play with better players. He knows, too, his fellow man has walked to greatness, the road ahead thus less daunting. Not Vishy. Like Padukone, he was the first to walk on his moon. Yet, his raw material was staggering, a congregation of memory, logic, reason, concentration. The synapses in his brain seemed to fire faster than Wyatt Earp, and he had seen the board, noted the moves, travelled deep into his memory, dissected each option, foreseen where he would be six moves ahead down four different roads, and found his answer quicker than you could draw breath.

There was one thing more. Beyond the mere application of stored knowledge, or the virtue of clear reasoning, he possessed what the Oxford Dictionary calls, “an immediate insight”. It is intuition, to just know, to sense which move smells of danger without explanation. It must be the gift of genius.

Genius does not guarantee immortality. We saw when he flirted fatally with impetuosity in the 11th game against Garry Kasparov at the 1995 PCA World Championship finals. We saw it again in the 1998 FIDE World Championship, when though tired—he played seven opponents in one month to qualify to play against a fresh Anatoly Karpov—he tripped on the rug to the victory podium. “Inexperience,” he says, and his sterling record makes a debate unwise.

He has beaten everyone, won the highest-rated tournaments, yet perhaps still we fail to gauge his standing. It is a stature that finds easy illustration. Each year, 250-odd chess journalists vote to decide who wins the year’s chess Oscar. In an era where Kasparov and Karpov have reigned, where, says chess writer Arvind Aaron, “50 per cent of the voters are Russians”, Anand won in 1997 and 1998.

But I see his greatness in a different reflection, in the effect one silent man over a board can have. K. Murali Mohan, joint secretary of the Tamil Nadu Chess Association, says that in 1990, an average of a 100 children entered local chess tournaments; today it is 400 and more. The catalyst has been Anand, the giver of dreams, his reputation a sort of elixir of greatness that young players drink from. As he rose, he took Indian chess with him. Today there are over 20 IMs; there are two more GMs; there is Koneru Humpy and Aarti Ramaswamy and P. Harikrishna, all teenage world champions. In just this, this small string of names, we understand best this man’s greatness.

Subscribe to India Today Magazine