Two new books look inside the minds of India’s chess prodigies

In sports writing, “talent” is a frequently used term. Its usage is also fairly ambiguous. Anyone who plays a sport at a competitive level or plays music professionally, for example, would presumably be “talented” in it.

In sports writing, it is often used for athletes who enter the limelight at an early age or display abilities that are pleasing to the eye, like a Sachin Tendulkar in cricket or a Roger Federer in tennis. It could be a coincidence that two concurrent books on the subject of chess have a similar opinion to the use of the word “talent”.

“People call you talented when they don’t see you as a real threat,” writes Viswanathan Anand in the Lightning Kid: 64 Winning Lessons from the Boy Who Became Five-Time World Chess Champion (with Susan Ninan). As a prodigy who has been written about since he was a young teen and identified since as a “talent”, Anand has a unique insider’s perspective on it.

“But even then, due to his (Anand’s) unconventional style and the relative obscurity of his origins, he was still regarded as a ‘talent’ by the greats of the game – a polite term used for players expected to burn bright for a brief while before fizzling out – as opposed to a ‘rival’,” writes Binit Priyaranjan in The Price of Genius: Inside the World of India’s Chess Prodigies.

The overlap in the two thoughts is natural as anything on Indian chess is inseparable from Anand. But the sport today has transitioned into something else, marking India as a powerhouse, as a supplier of a continuous stream of young “talented” players, as a career option, a financially viable choice, which are addressed by both books.

Lightning Kid is aimed at young audiences, with Anand offering readers “64-bite sized lessons, one for every square on the chessboard”. It is also his life story, with overlaps from his 2019 autobiography Mind Matters: Winning Lessons from a Champion’s Life (also with Ninan). The former world chess champion, whose opponents these days are sometimes younger than his teenage son, has also taken on a mentorship role besides being the sport’s most recognisable spokesperson (the book is adapted for young readers by Vatsala Kaul Banerjee).

Each chapter ends with a “Vishy Says”, a nugget of advice, like one that says, “Love your main passion, but don’t make it the only thing in your life… Hobbies aren’t a distraction – they refresh your mind… In the long run, this balance is your superpower.”“The best way to win is to understand how you lost,” he writes elsewhere.

Anand was an early bloomer—at least for his time—becoming India’s first Grandmaster a few days after his 18th birthday in 1987, already being hailed as a prodigy. It stands in sharp contrast to three decades later when R Praggnanandhaa became the youngest GM in 2018 at age 12 years, 10 months, 13 days. His record as an Indian was bettered barely a year later by future world champion D Gukesh at age 12, 7, 17.

Anand’s rise—to becoming a five-time world champion—is pretty well chronicled, including in Mind Matters, like his move to Spain, his world title matches, his challenges as a lone flag bearer for the sport in the country. But what he adds in Lightning Kid are nuances that explain the processes of chess players, the triumphs and lows, dealing with difficult situations and simplifying them for his target audience.

For instance, how do chess players hold in their heads thousands of moves, hundreds of positions and more than 50 years of chess history (while being fully capable of forgetting a wedding anniversary)? He says people assume that chess players have a photographic memory but the reality is far less magical—and a lot more interesting.

Quoting the work of Dutch psychologist and chess player Adriaan de Groot, Anand says chess players don’t memorize piece-by-piece, but they memorize patterns, familiar shapes, structures and tactical ideas. “Our minds chunk them together into meaningful units, the same way a musician doesn’t remember every note individually but sees entire chords and phrases.” Memory isn’t magic, he writes, but it’s about practice, patterns and perspective.

In recent years, Anand, who has semi-retired from the sport, has taken on the role of a mentor through his Westbridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA), to help young Indian players develop into world-class champions. The initial WACA roster included five promising players—Nihal Sarin, Pragg, R Vaishali, Raunak Sadhwani and Gukesh, three of whom are the focus of Priyaranjan’s thesis.

He calls them the Fab Four, the quartet of Gukesh, Pragg, Sarin and Arjun Erigaisi, as he tries to understand what it takes for prodigies to become geniuses. Though used interchangeably, Priyaranjan distinguishes them as prodigies being children who can be potential geniuses.

If Anand’s is a more personal account of his career and challenges, The Price of Genius is a broader account of Indian chess, especially the recent years (post-Anand) when a steady stream of “prodigies” took the limelight.

Chess is more visible now, has greater state endorsement, more interest from the private sector, sponsorships and a larger competition base. The pandemic, and subsequent explosion of online streaming, has democratised the sport further, bringing it closer to a larger audience.

India has produced 80 of its 87 GMs in the 21st century, several players from upper or upper-middle-class backgrounds, which has allowed them the freedom to prioritise chess over academics. The Anand influence is overwhelming, in paving the way for others to dream of a future in the sport.

The sport calls for sacrifices, Priyaranjan quotes chess player Raunak Sadhwani’s father as saying, “A child prodigy in chess does not get to be a child in his childhood.” “For monks, much like for GMs,” believes Priyaranjan, “there is no final answer to how high human consciousness can be raised, how far its potential can be pushed and what it may reveal about what it means to be human… Such is the quest of a chess-monk for the best move, and he seeks only to seek it, and he seeks it only for love.”

The Price of Genius aims to help us better understand India’s young chess players, teenagers at the pinnacle of the sport, travelling the world and poised for lucrative earnings. It’s new for India—besides Sachin Tendulkar, rarely has an Indian teenage sportsperson achieved so much. There is not one but several such prodigies in chess (Divya Deshmukh won the Women’s World Cup last year at age 19). But the book skirts the periphery of that discovery—it reveals the world of the sport in greater detail than it does the minds of the four individuals that it prioritises.

Between The Price of Genius and Lightning Kid, both short, easy reads, lies a discovery of the sport India introduced to the world and is now poised to conquer centuries later. Neither book digs deep, but they offer a sufficient dip.

“… this is a stage every player goes through—moving from chasing success to finding freedom in the game itself,” writes Anand. “Because the game is more than a game to me; it has been a game-change for life.”