Anand deserves Bharat Ratna

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Encomiums are pouring in for Viswanathan Anand from across the length and breadth of the country. As they should for there has been no more compelling world champion from India.

I’ll desist from getting involved further in the debate on whether he deserves the Bharat Ratna or not. My stated position even before he played the recent World Championship has been that if a living sportsman has to be given this award, Vishy Anand can’t be ignored; after the triumph over Gelfand, this position can only get more strength.
I’ve always wondered what makes Anand such a great competitor. On the few occasions we’ve met, I’ve admired his candour and droll sense of humour, and above all else his remarkable self-control. He always appeared to be on top of things, on or off record.
But that still didn’t explain the prowess which made him five times World Champion. I must admit here to my knowledge of chess being severely restricted to the basics, but even so. There must be some strengths some stellar virtues which makes him such a formidable player.
Unable to crack this myself, I tossed this query to the redoubtable Pravin Thipsay, several times national champion in the 1980s and 1990s, who mailed me his reply. It’s breaks down Anand’s technique a tad simplistically, but is no less revealing for that.
“During a game a chess player, however great,’’ explains Thipsay, generally studies a position, then selects a few options on general principles, analyses them and arrives at some decision, right or wrong. Anand is different. He arrives at one or two of the strongest options (probably through intuition) as soon as he sees a position and works on them. If there is something wrong with these options, only then does he go for different ones. That is the secret of his rapid play. He is sheer genius.’’
“But superb technique is only one half of a champion’s success. The other, equally important as history suggests, is temperament — or personality of you will.” Thipsay lists out the qualities which make Anand different in this aspect too.
Other important things behind Anand’s success, he says, are his cold objectivity, self-confidence, lack of ego, ability to admit mistakes made during the course of a game and the skills to control the damage arising from these mistakes therefore. He just seems to sense something going wrong before it is too late.