Inside the minds of India's chess prodigies

Two new books shine the spotlight on what it takes to make a career in a sport that is fast becoming more visible and lucrative

- Arun Janardhan

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.

The word 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 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