LUNCH WITH FT: Viswanathan Anand
A long game
Jo Johnson / London January 29, 2008
The world chess champion is a hero in India. But staying on top requires preparation when you're a late-30s 'dinosaur'.

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, writes Jo Johnson. "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."

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.

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.

The average age of the top 100 chess players in FIDE's ranking is just 30. 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. 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.

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."

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.

"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 {openings after} whole countries. Two centuries ago they could name a district. Now you just get to name a garden."

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 skeptical of the euphoria about its new "superpower" {chess} 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, to have remembered basic moves.. so as 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 'til the end of time I would be lucky to witness it. We call it a day.