Viswanathan Anand
By Jo Johnson
FT
January 18 2008 21:06
Viswanathan Anand, the supreme exponent of blitz chess, has made his
first move by the time I join him at our table. Watermelon juice. Cold.
The Indian press has been wall-to-wall `Vishy’ since he won the World
Championship last September, but, given the raw processing power
required of his brain, the celebrations have been mostly teetotal.
`I’ll have a glass of wine once in a while,’ he says. `Just not before
a match. That would not be a good idea because at my age I don’t have
the tolerance of the young Russian boys: three glasses and they’re
still fine the next morning.’
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An ancient game, chess gets younger every year. For a player of his
age, Anand’s synapses are in remarkable form. His victory at the World
Chess Championship in Mexico pushed his Federation Internationale des
Echecs (FIDE) rating above the 2,800 barrier. It is a feat achieved by
only three other players in the history of the game ` Garry Kasparov,
Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov. `Even if age is not an immense
advantage in chess, to put it mildly, sometimes a bit of experience is
not so bad,’ he says. `I am surprised at how good my 37th year has
been.’
The chef at Cappuccino, a restaurant in the Park Sheraton hotel in
Chennai, Anand’s hometown, is already waiting to take our order,
beaming benevolently at the city’s favourite son. Anand follows his
recommendations: Tuscan fresh tomato soup as a starter, followed by
wholewheat spaghetti with creamy lobster and smoked salmon sauce.
I order the same, as I have so been busy explaining to Anand how my
mobile phone will also be acting as a voice recorder that I haven’t
managed to look at the menu.
The average age of the top 100 chess players in FIDE’s ranking is just
30. When Kasparov retired from tournament chess in 2005, at the age of
41, he gleefully announced to Anand: `I’m out, now you’re the oldest!
You’re the dinosaur now!’ Anand says he works hard to maintain his
stamina, exercising in the gym for 90 minutes each day, to compensate
for the physical edge that the 17-year-olds have on him. His forearms,
revealed by a turquoise short-sleeved shirt blazoned with the logo of
his sponsor, NIIT, an Indian IT training company, are more builder than
brainbox.
Even though he now lives most of the year in Spain, Anand has in a
sense brought chess home to India. But it is a different game to the
one born on the subcontinent. If there is a consensus over the game’s
murky origins it is that chess appeared in India around AD600, moved to
Persia 100 years later and then in the ninth century reached Europe via
Arab Spain, where the queen, replacing a docile male vizier permitted
only to move to a diagonal adjacent square, eventually became the most
powerful piece on the board. The old version of the game is still
played in Delhi and Lucknow.
The first `non-Soviet’ champion since Bobby Fischer, Anand believes
India now has a chance to excel on the globalised chess battlefield,
suggesting that the country’s success in information technology may
spring from the same genetic code. `Indians generally do very badly in
sport, but they seem to take very naturally to chess,’ he says. `By
non-Russian standards, India is pretty good.’ Although India is only
ranked 14th in FIDE’s rating system, many of the countries that are
placed higher depend heavily on Russian emigres.
Anand is trying to reintroduce chess to India, where the passion for
cricket leaves scant resources for other sports. With NIIT, he has
pushed for the introduction of computer-based chess tuition and
competitions in Indian schools, launching the Mind Champions’ Academy,
an initiative that has fostered nearly 6,000 clubs with more than
100,000 student members. The idea is not to hothouse champions or do
heavy-duty coaching, but to help stretch young minds. `Studies show
that chess playing made people do better academically and brought down
juvenile crime,’ he says.
For a chess prodigy, Anand managed to have a relatively normal
childhood. His father was general manager of Southern Railway, whose
network covers the states at the tip of the Indian peninsula. At the
age of six, after watching his elder brother and sister playing chess,
he developed an interest in the game. `I went to my mom and said `teach
me’. She acted as my coach for the next six years.’ Many of the great
players started even younger, he says, some when they were just three
or four: `If you have a natural aptitude, it shows early.’
His infatuation with the game deepened when his family moved to the
Philippines for a year, shortly after the city of Baguio had hosted the
notorious 1978 World Championship clash between Anatoly Karpov, the
defending Soviet champion, and Viktor Korchnoi, who had defected to the
west two years earlier. Newspapers revelled in the cold war mindgames
that saw Korchnoi forced to wear mirror glasses to ward off Karpov’s
hypnotic stares, passionate protests about the flags used on the board,
and histrionics that required the players’ chairs to be X-rayed.
`A normal childhood is important. There’s a point where being fanatical
about chess doesn’t help you become a better player. Going to school
would give me a chance to forget about chess for a while. Children are
very smart and they can easily learn to balance both academics and
chess.’ By the time he was 16, however, Anand had won the national
championship and was travelling half the year. He pursued a bachelor’s
degree in commerce at Chennai’s elite Loyola College only as `a
fallback’. When he graduated, he was India’s first grandmaster and was
ranked ninth in the world.
He developed a reputation as a lightning-fast player but also as one
who was at ease in all the game’s formats: matches against one
opponent, round-robin tournaments and bouts against computers. He won
his first world championship in 2000 ` when the title was split between
two rival federations ` and again last year, by which time it had been
reunified. Glory may be short-lived. In October he must take on
Vladimir Kramnik, a former world champion who came in second in Mexico
and was granted the right to re-challenge Anand for his title, to the
normally placid Indian’s irritation.
Computers capable of calculating millions of permutations have closed
down areas of the game. Endgames with six or fewer pieces, for example,
now hold little interest to connoisseurs. Breakthroughs are
`difficult’, Anand says. `Five centuries ago people got to name whole
countries. Two centuries ago they could name a district. Now you just
get to name a garden.’ But the game is far from played out. `It’s alive
right now. Revolutionary stuff can turn up anywhere, often without you
realising it. When a game’s on the line, sometimes you come up with
great stuff.’
In Mexico, he had `a couple of great ideas’, developments on the Moscow
variation of the Semi-Slav Defence, that tilted the game against Levon
Aronian, a strong Armenian player. Anand surprised Aronian with his
17th move of c5. This unexpected ploy locked Aronian’s bishop out of
the game. Weeks of careful preparation had paid off. `He didn’t have
certainty,’ says Anand, who went on to take the game and then the
championship. `He thought I might have made a mistake.’
When he returned to India, a country that takes enormous pride in the
success of its diaspora, he was greeted as a hero. Mani Shankar Aiyar,
the country’s maverick sports minister, who has refused to endorse
India’s ambitions to host major international events on the grounds
that they are irrelevant to the common man, hailed Anand’s victory as
an `utterly remarkable achievement … without parallel or precedent’.
Yet for all the honours that India has bestowed upon him over the
years, he is sceptical of the euphoria about its new `superpower’
status, describing it as `premature’.
`What’s actually changed? Is it India or is it just western perceptions
of India?’ he asks. Yet he acknowledges that India’s increasing
integration with the global economy may help him spend more time here.
He and his wife, Aruna, who manages his relations with the media and
the logistics of his life as a roving grandmaster, have just bought a
home in Chennai. He says he will start `gravitating’ back to India. `I
moved to Spain because I wanted to work with strong players,’ he says.
`Now it’s much easier to work remotely over the internet.’
Much of his best preparatory work, however, still takes place in
face-to-face sessions with his longstanding principal second, Peter
Heine Nielsen. The 34-year-old Danish grandmaster, whose FIDE rating of
2,626 puts him just outside the top 100, plays a role similar to a
golfer’s caddy, Anand says, `keeping track of all the information he
needs to avoid a mistake’. They work mainly on computers, with Anand
only using a board just before a game `to get a feel for the pieces’ in
intense sessions that last eight or nine hours.
As the flag falls on our lunch, the moment I have been half-dreading
arrives. It would be a dereliction of duty not to offer him a game.
`Full size!’ he says in delight, as I produce a folding wooden set from
my bag. Determined to avoid a humiliating `cheapo’, as quick defeats
are known, I play cautiously as the waiters line up to watch. Anand
makes his moves within milliseconds of mine. Within 20 moves, my
position is hopeless and I resign. `Many good moves,’ he says
encouragingly, as he scribbles down the notation from memory. `Not bad
at all for someone who doesn’t play often.’
As the restaurant manager snaps away with his camera, Anand resets the
board, his pieces lining up instantly as mine stumble towards their
appointed positions. After my first game since before the millennium, I
am too relieved I have remembered basic moves to want to risk a second.
For me to level the score against a player of his ranking would be an
event so unlikely that even if I played him twice daily until the end
of time I would be lucky to witness it. We call it a day.
Jo Johnson is the FT’s south Asia bureau chief
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
