The Anand school of grandmasters

Viswanathan Anand nurtures promising players by fitting into their existing schedule and adding a layer of expertise

- Arun Janardhan

One of the things that has surprised Viswanathan Anand about young chess players now is they order everything, including food, online. As a touring chess pro for about four decades, he looked forward to going out at meal times during competitions, which provided a relief from the intensity of being bent over a chess board for hours.

"But it's a different generation (now)," he says, smiling over a video call from Chennai. "I would have a carefully drawn a map of the interesting places I could eat at. Now, they get food deliveries even from the neighboring town."

The emblematic symbol of chess in India, now 54 years old, has in recent times segued into multiple roles as his playing days continue to become fewer. One of them is as the deputy president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE); the other is as a mentor to the next generation of Indian players.

The latter has come through the West Bridge Anand Chess Academy or WACA (not to be confused with Perth's cricket ground), which started four years ago. The project came about serendipitously, says Sandeep Singhal, the co-founder and managing partner of investment firm WestBridge Capital, which has over $7 billion in assets under management.

When Anand, invited to talk to their investors pre-pandemic, was leaving the meeting, Singhal asked if they could contribute to chess. Anand said he would think about it and when he got back to Singhal, it was with the idea for WACA.

Anand had some inspiration from the Russian grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik, whose influence in structuring chess as a sport in the erstwhile Soviet Union created a generation of superstars, including Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov. The Samford Fellowship in the US, given to promising players for the last four decades, was the other motivation; so WACA decided to combine the two.