Fair and Square

Rohit Mahajan

Viswanathan Anand, a god of the 64 black-and-white squares, the man who spawned a generation of Indian Grandmasters, the owner of a beautiful mind, is flesh and bones, after all. And flesh and bones age. The mind ages, too. Anand is 50 — none of the teens of the 1980s-1990s ever thought that Anand — Lightning Kid! — would remain anything but the youth who thought fast and moved his pieces with the speed of thought.

Anand, the universally acknowledged nice guy, still possesses a beautiful, sharp mind — but oh, it’s lost a bit of its edge. The decline is ever so little, but he’s no longer a world champion, and with each passing day, it’s becoming unlikelier that he would be that ever again. But just to clarify — Anand at 50 is no dullard — he’s ranked No. 13 in the world. That’s stupendous, for chess has thousands, if not millions, of serious players worldwide. India alone now has 64 Grandmasters — such a nice number! — yet none of his 63 followers can touch him, even in decline. He’s been the best Indian player for all of his post-teenage life. It’s been a great life and in his book, Anand, for the first time, shines a bright light on his journey, on his joys and despairs, with an unsparing and almost semi-clinical attitude.

Anand tells his story with uncompromising honesty. Yet, Anand has revealed nothing sensational — not because he’s not lived a sensational life with sensational successes, but because his mind is hardwired to reticence rather than exuberance, de-escalation rather than escalation of crisis.

Chess empires

It’s not that there haven’t been provocations — he was just a regular guy from India, where chess has roots but which had no great — not even good — global player. He was up against players from countries where the culture was steeped in the game, and the state supported the creation of champions. For these players, winning the world title was a matter of life and death. Mind games were commonplace. Thus, in 1998, after Anatoly Karpov had won their World Championship match, he said to a reporter in the presence of Anand and his wife Aruna: “Ah, well, Vishy is a nice guy, but he doesn’t have the character for a big win.”

What Anand spoke in his mind then, he writes in his book: “Yes, I obviously don’t have the strength of character to lie on a pool chair while my buddies at FIDE get me seeded into the final.”

That was the background of his loss to Karpov in 1998 — Anand had gone through three weeks of a gruelling knockout tournament, which he won, on December 30, 1997. He then realised that the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) had not made any arrangement for his travel from Groningen in the Netherlands to Lausanne in Switzerland, where the final was to start on January 2 — a mere three days later! Despite the New Year rush, he somehow managed to reach Lausanne, but FIDE hadn’t booked a hotel for him. Karpov benefited, as Anand writes, due to his “buddies at FIDE”.

That’s how it worked in chess, and continues to work. If the champion is determined to force his advantage, he would make sure that the dice is loaded in his favour.

For their 1995 World Championship match at the World Trade Center in New York, for instance, it was Garry Kasparov who called all the shots. And Anand? “The rules and the turf belonged to Kasparov. I wasn’t consulted on any of the decisions,” he writes. “It was almost as though I was an alien landing at the match from a far-off exoplanet.”

Mr Nice Guy

Chess, more than any other sport, is a game of the mind. Whether it’s a sport at all is matter of another debate. In chess, being a nice guy could be a euphuism for not being strong-willed. In the case of, say, Federer or Dravid, “nice guy” would mean that they’re really top-class fellows, irrespective of their excellence on the field of play. In chess, it could mean not quite having the strength of character to be the best”.

Karpov making a snide remark about Anand in Anand’s presence was what you call sledging in cricket; but Karpov probably did actually believe what he said. Anand himself writes: “For a long time in my career, I wasn’t quite fired up by the ambition to become a World Champion ...I was content travelling to tournaments around the world, playing good games, putting up a decent fight and being known as a strong player. It was my match against Kasparov in New York in 1995 that changed my attitude.”

Two years after Karpov’s snide comment, Anand became the world champion — and he did so despite not forsaking his nice-guyness. Anand’s book is revealing, yet reticent. The subtitle of the book seems to promote it as a self-help book, and Anand indeed does give insights into the workings of memory, ambition, changing with times, working with people…

Curiously, he notes that after his loss to Kasparov in 1995, he went to see a psychologist, but didn’t “see myself confiding in a stranger for therapeutic purposes”, so “we dropped it soon after”.

In this book, though Anand writes about the traumatic times he went through — the death of his mother, losing their unborn child when Aruna had a miscarriage — he does it with his native reticence. The general tone is understated and, it must be said, a bit bland.

Anand has offered us a guided, though limited, tour of his beautiful mind. The technical parts would appeal more to the chess player, but for the lay reader too, it’s a rewarding exercise.