India's Vishwanathan Anand
defended his world championship chess title for
the fifth time a fortnight ago in Moscow,
consolidating his status as one of Asia's greatest
and more unusual sporting icons. He stands as a
Great Wall of Asia defying Russian desperation to
regain their lost chess czardom.
Ever since Anand dethroned
the mighty Vladimir Kramnik in 2008, the affable
margherita pizza-loving champion from Chennai has
been a bitter pill to swallow for Russians. It's
an undesirable chapter for the land that produced
masters like Mikhail Botvinnik, Alexander
Alekhine, Mikhail "the Magician" Tal, Anatoly
Karpov and Garry Kasparov.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu were among millions worldwide who
closely
followed Anand against proxy
Russian challenger Boris Gelfand. Though an
Israeli citizen, the 43-year-old was born in
Belarussia and grew up in Moscow.
Negative pressure from the
local media and former world champions made this
summer's tournament a clash between the 42-year
old Anand and Russia itself. During the 12-match
series, Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov
publicly ridiculed Anand for lacking motivation
and the mental strength to win, saying he had lost
his edge. "Vishy Anand - In Russia, without love",
Forbes India magazine headlined its feature on the
championship.
But Anand prevailed in the
tense tie-breaker of a 6-6 deadlock, retaining the
world crown for the fourth consecutive time.
"My
nerves held out better," he told the New York
Times, after pocketing US$1.4 million in prize
money. "I simply held on for dear life."
After the match, Putin
invited Anand and Gelfand to his residence at
Novo-Ogaryovo outside Moscow on May 31, where he
congratulated the duo for an "outstanding" effort
and served them some tea and wry Russian humour.
When Anand told him he had learnt strategies at
the Tal Chess Club of the Soviet Cultural Centre
in Chennai, Putin quipped, "So, we brought this on
ourselves."
Anand, known from childhood
prodigy days as the "Lightning Kid" for his
unusual speed of play, could be gradually
propelling chess into realms of art and even
frontier sciences of mind and matter.
Chess, the "game of kings",
has its early origins attributed to India during
the Gupta Empire in the 6th century AD.
With
the number of possible legal moves in chess
estimated to be a non-worldly number of 10^123,
chess is closely linked to mathematics, a subject
of deep interest to Anand.
India has no great history of
past chess champions, but the country is long
known for mathematical geniuses like Srinvasa
Ramanujam (see India celebrates the man who
'knew' infinity, Asia Times Online, January
10, 2012). If Anand takes to a career in maths
after retiring from chess, he could well join this
remarkable lineage.
As with Ramanujam,
conventional science has no theory to explain
Anand's phenomenal powers of memory and a mind
like a virtual computer chess database. A Chennai
newspaper reported of him once seeing a recreated
chess game between two grandmasters played many
decades ago - it took him only a few seconds to
identify the two players, the tournament and place
where it was played.
For the degree of memory
power and brilliance Anand has shown from
childhood, the mind needs to have attained a
certain level of clarity and purity from living a
clean life. Nothing happens by chance or
coincidence. The law of cause and effect always
comes into play, and in making the right moves in
life over a long period of time.
Anand was about two to three
years my junior in Don Bosco, Egmore, which in the
1970s and 1980s was like a mini-Eton and Harrow of
Chennai. Our school was producing exceptional
talent in academics and sport, but Anand achieved
rare success in both. Ram
Bhat, Anand's long-time class mate and friend,
recalled how Anand's international chess playing
schedule allowed him to attend only about 15 days
of school during the critical and difficult final
year of Standard 12, with the state government
public exam required to secure eligibility for
college.
"Anand got 200 in maths [out
of a possible 200], 198 in physics, and 192 in
chemistry," Bhat told Asia Times Online, with awe
undiluted after nearly 25 years. "He just cracked
the exam [and the entire year's syllabus in all
subjects] using the brief study holidays of two
weeks."
Anand had once been given the
much coveted permit issued to bunk school
officially for the day to participate in sports or
cultural competitions. He had to play the final of
a chess tournament in nearby Loyola College, a
10-minute drive away down Sterling Road.
He
came back in about 30 minutes to rejoin the class.
"What happened?" asked the surprised teacher. "The
tournament is over," Anand said. He had finished
off his opponent in five minutes, and hurriedly
returned to what was a rare treat for him:
attending classes.
More unusually, Anand is a
self-made world champion who grew up in a largely
non-chess environment in school. At Don Bosco we
grew up amid a warm, friendly atmosphere very
encouraging to talent; we had coaches for cricket
and table tennis, teachers for music, art, French
and German, but I can't remember any great
interest in chess, or anyone arguing over
advantages of the "Sicilian Defense" over the
"Danish Gambit".
Interest during school lunch
break was largely centered round cricket, "croker"
- our exhilarating version of baseball - and Hanif
the ice-cream man, who doled out his memorable
orange, grape, coffee and pista-flavoured frozen
delights from near the basketball court.
During morning assembly in
early 1980s, Anand's name was nearly as much a
fixture as the national and school anthem, with
the principal Fr Stephen Bernard or vice-principal
Fr PV Simon announcing him winning one chess
tournament after another. He was national
sub-junior champion at the age of 14 in 1983. By
age 18, he had become India's first grandmaster.
Being an extraordinary
childhood talent can cause challenges to stay
level-headed through adolescence, but he seemed to
have no such diffculty. "Anand's humility stood
out even in those early years," Michael Sundaram,
our English master in high school, told Asia Times
Online. "He was winning major national awards as a
schoolboy, but what was special about Anand was
that he did not consider himself special."
Humility, of course, comes
from detachment to the "I" and "my", and from
taking more care to respect other's feelings
rather than expecting respect from others. This
humility has been among Anand's secrets of
non-controversial longevity in a high pressure
chess arena acknowledged to be mentally brutal at
the highest level.
A product of the computer era
that was born in India during Rajiv Gandhi
tenureship as prime minister in the late 1980s,
Anand was a pioneer in Asia to extensively use
computers in chess nearly three decades ago.
Braving a 200% customs duty, he imported his first
computer and taught himself how to use it - with
interesting results. In 1988, when Anand teamed up
with computer chess wizard Frederic Friedel in
Hamburg, Germany, Friedel almost fell off his
chair seeing Anand very efficiently using the
mouse upside down. Anand was even more amazed to
be told this wasn't exactly the way other humans
use it.
The Spanish-speaking Anand
owns a database of about four million unique chess
games, but understands that a computer - not even
IBM's Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov, and more
modern chess programs like Houdini and Rybka - can
consistently match human creativity, ingenuity and
ability to take an utterly unexpected decision.
"The computer can also be
insidious," Anand told a Chennai-based journalist.
"If working with the computer means you stop
taking risks, it's going to kill you. Managing a
computer is I think very tricky. It is very
powerful but it may not tell you what you want."
Not merely use of powerful
computers or his world championship victories, but
it is the charismatic power from being a simple
human being that seems to have reserved Anand a
special place in the pantheon of all-time chess
greats.
Anand is at present away
incommunicado with his family in Eastern Europe,
and is next due to defend his chess crown in 2014.
In the impermanence of all things, Anand may or
may not be dethroned by emerging giants like
Magnus Carlsen, a 21-year-old prodigy from Haslum,
Norway.
Yet among a curious tribe of
sour and dour-looking world chess champions, who
appear to more easily win tournaments than
popularity polls among peers, Anand offers some
proof that being considered a harmless person is
no impediment to finishing first, again and again.
(The above chronicle is a small token of
infinite gratitude to my mother whose sacrifices
enabled me to continue studying in Don Bosco amid
a severe family crisis, to others in the path
leading to Mumbai and to the happy universe of
Dhamma and reality through practice of Vipassana and Metta
Bhavana. )
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times
Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
