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| Illustration: Ashoke Mullick |
If he wants a new career, Viswanathan Anand could try his hand at poker. Nothing seems to faze the world chess champion: not the fact that we have been stuck in the parking lot of a school for the past 15 minutes, nor the endless honking that’s going on all around him. “Are you always this calm,” I ask him. With a blink-and-you-miss chuckle he says, “In my profession you have to be poker-faced.”
The 41-year-old bespectacled gentleman sitting in the taxi has been attracting some attention. A few curious people have been peering in to get a glimpse of him. Some others have been clicking him on their mobile phone cameras from the other side of the window pane. And Anand hasn’t twitched a muscle.
“I too lose my temper but rarely will you notice any emotion on my face,” he says. “I have learnt the art of remaining nonchalant in difficult situations.”
The champ seems to be a man of few airs — and certainly a man of few words. Though he has agreed to an interview in the midst of a choc-a-bloc schedule on a recent visit to Delhi, he chooses his words with care. The interview is being conducted while he travels from one appointment to another — for that’s when he has ample time on his hands.
But these are rare occasions, for Anand is almost always running against time. He remembers the difficulties he found himself in just prior to the World Chess Championships last year. He was on a flight from Frankfurt to Sofia when parts of Europe got enveloped in a cloud of volcanic ash flowing in from Iceland. Flights got cancelled and Anand was stranded. His request for a postponement of the tournament was turned down by the Bulgarian organisers. He eventually reached Sofia after an exhausting 40-hour road journey. And then, of course, he went on to win the match and retain his World Championship title.
“There was little I could do to change the situation. I just got a grip on myself and played,” says Anand, looking dapper in navy blue and gray suit with hair neatly combed over his forehead, covering any hint of a receding hairline.
Anand was in the capital on a two-day trip before flying off to Ahmedabad where he was part of a world record breaking event. As many as 20,480 people assembled in the Gujarat city to set a world record in simultaneous chess, eclipsing the previous record set in Mexico four years ago.
The player, clearly, likes to posit chess as a game of the masses. Along with information technology trainer NIIT he launched the NIIT Mind Champions’ Academy in 2002 which has till now fostered 11,200 chess clubs with over 9,00,000 students as members in schools across India. “We are soon going to cross the one-million mark,” says the six-time world champion. “Chess is like learning a language. So it’s easier to teach a child than an adult.”
Anand, in fact, learnt it like his mother tongue while growing up in Chennai. He started playing chess at the age of six under the tutelage of his mother but honed his skills when the family moved to the Philippines for a year with Anand’s engineer father. “There they had a TV programme on puzzles with chess moves which my mother used to write down and in the evening we used to solve them together. That’s how my fascination for chess began,” says the commerce graduate from Loyola College, Chennai.
On his return to India, Anand started winning one title after another. In 1983, he became India’s sub-junior chess champion and in 1985, at the age of 16, he became a national champion. Two years later he was the first Asian to win a World Junior Chess Championship. In 1988, Anand became India’s first Grandmaster. He was awarded the Padma Shri the same year — and then went on to win a host of other awards.
Since April 2007, Anand has been the world’s top ranking chess player on five occasions. In October 2008, he dropped out of the world top three ranking for the first time since July 1996. He officially regained the world number one ranking in November 2010.
Vishy, as he is popularly known, is not greatly bothered about rankings and ratings. “At present I am the world champion but it will change by the time your article is published,” he says. Number 1 till the end of December, he slid by one position last week.
“Rankings hardly matter when you have played professionally for over two decades,” says the soft-spoken chess master. His contemporaries tend to agree. Veteran chess champion Czech-American Lubomir Kavalek calls Anand the most versatile world champion ever, pointing out that he has won the world chess championships in many formats, including knockout, tournament, match, rapid and blitz. British Grandmaster Michael Adams hails him as a master who decides his own fate in a game.
But for Anand the biggest compliment came from a stranger whom he met on a train on his way from Tamil Nadu to Kerala. A fellow passenger asked him what he did for a living. Anand replied that he played chess. The stranger wasn’t impressed. He wanted to know if his father had a family business. How else, he argued, would Anand earn a living without a full-time job? “In India, only Viswanathan Anand earns a living through chess. Hope you know that,” he said as a parting shot.
Our taxi has, in the meantime, moved from the open Noida area, on the outskirts of Delhi, to the congested heart of the city. As the exteriors change from lush green to earthy brown, our conversation steers to a recent controversy that left a minister red-faced. In August last year, Anand was denied an honorary doctorate proposed by the University of Hyderabad after the human resource development ministry raised questions over his nationality, for Anand spent considerable time training and playing in Spain. Minister Kapil Sibal later apologised to Anand, who brushes off the incident with characteristic tact. “It was just a bureaucratic error and I felt there was no need for anybody to apologise to me,” he says.
But the incident would have been quite a dampener, for Anand is one of the most feted sportsmen in India today. A few weeks ago, he was conferred with a lifetime achievement award by the Delhi government for his outstanding contribution to chess. “Awards are recognition of one’s work but they don’t really affect how I make the next move on the chessboard.”
Anand won the inaugural Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award in 1991, the Padma Bhushan in 2000 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2007. His book My Best Games of Chess got him the British Chess Federation Book of the Year Award in 1998. In 2005, he won the coveted Chess Oscar, thus becoming the first non-Russian to win the award for the fourth time, after previous wins in 1997, 1998 and 2003.
One would think that he eats, drinks and breathes chess, but Anand insists that he has other interests as well. He enjoys meeting friends but isn’t a party animal, he hastens to point out. “I like travelling, watching movies and reading books.” Who’s his favourite Bollywood actor? “I like Aamir Khan. He seems to be doing pretty well without outdoing anything.”
He was the only sportsperson to have been invited by the Prime Minister to a recent dinner hosted for American President Barack Obama, “I was seated next to Aamir Khan. We ended up discussing the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,” he says with a smile.
Anand, who was living in Spain for a decade, has now relocated to Chennai with wife Aruna. “I lived in Europe as it was easier to train there,” he says. “But now it’s easy to travel from India and I can train here as well,” he adds. “Also, I wanted to be close to my family and friends,” says the ace player.
And when does he plan to hang up his chessboard? “My next stop is Holland where I will be playing a championship match. Beyond that I haven’t thought about much,” he says as we reach his destination. And that’s hard to believe, coming from a man whose game is all about plotting moves well in advance. If he were a poker player, I’d have thought he had a few aces up his sleeve.