🇮🇳 Viswanathan Anand

Viswanathan Anand was born on 11 December 1969 in Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, and grew up in a small flat in Chennai's Besant Nagar neighbourhood. His father Krishnamurthy Iyer was a manager at the Southern Railway; his mother Sushila was an early member of the Tamil Nadu State Chess Association and the first person to teach him the moves. By the time he was six the family had moved briefly to Manila for his father's work, and the young Vishy spent long afternoons watching Filipino television programmes where chess problems were solved live — an immersion that, by his own account, taught him to calculate at speed long before he understood why speed was important.

He won the Indian Sub-Junior Championship at fourteen, the National Championship at sixteen, and the World Junior title at eighteen. The speed of his moves became his trademark: in the Spanish-Italian rapid play-off of 1991, against an exhausted Boris Gulko, he made his first 16 moves in 50 seconds, prompting commentator Jonathan Speelman to coin the nickname 'the Lightning Kid.' The label would follow him for thirty years, gradually transforming from a description of his speed of play to a description of his speed of mind: Anand has never, in any documented interview, paused longer than a second before answering a chess question.

He became India's first Grandmaster in 1988 at the age of 18 — at that time the youngest GM in the world. The chess landscape of India in 1988 was, in essence, three serious tournament players. Anand began winning international events at a rate Indian sports administration could not initially process; the All India Chess Federation lacked the budget to send him to half the events he qualified for, and his early travel was funded by Reliance Industries chairman Dhirubhai Ambani, who had read a profile of the eighteen-year-old in a Bombay newspaper and decided, unilaterally, to underwrite him.

The world title campaign that began in 2000 and ended in 2012 — twelve years of defending and re-winning the world championship in five formats and three governing-body frameworks — is the longest period of dominance any single player has imposed on chess since Garry Kasparov. He won the FIDE knockout title in 2000. He won the unified world title in 2007 in Mexico City. He defended it against Kramnik (Bonn, 2008), against Veselin Topalov (Sofia, 2010), and against Boris Gelfand (Moscow, 2012). He lost it, finally, to Magnus Carlsen in Chennai in 2013 — at home, in front of his nine-year-old son Akhil, in a match that drew the largest crowds chess has ever attracted on the Indian subcontinent. He took the loss with the equanimity that has been his signature; he returned, the following year, and won the Candidates Tournament to earn another world-title shot, which he lost again to Carlsen in Sochi.

What he did off the board is, by any honest accounting, more important than what he did on it. The Anand Chess Academy in Chennai, founded in 2002 and now training over 300 children at a time, is the source of every Indian Grandmaster of the post-2010 generation — Pentala Harikrishna, Adhiban, Vidit Gujrathi, Praggnanandhaa, Gukesh Dommaraju, Arjun Erigaisi. India crossed 80 Grandmasters in 2024; in 1988 there was one. The man who held the title in between, who shared his openings with the children, who turned up at the state-level Tamil Nadu schools cricket tournaments to give the prizes himself — was Anand. Gukesh Dommaraju, who in 2024 became the youngest World Chess Champion in history at eighteen, has called Anand 'the only reason a kid like me even imagined this was a job.'

He is, in May 2026, 56 years old. He continues to play classical chess at elite events, though increasingly as a senior mentor rather than as a title challenger. He owns a coffee plantation in Coorg, runs a chess academy with branches in Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, and has become a strangely effective television commentator — articulate, gracious, willing to admit when a position confuses him. His Padma Vibhushan, awarded in 2007, makes him the only sportsperson other than Sachin Tendulkar to hold India's second-highest civilian honour. He has, in essence, completed the only job that mattered: he found Indian chess in obscurity and left it, three decades later, ruling the world.