India’s success in chess is showing the path to Viksit Bharat
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Situated on the outskirts of Chennai, M.A. Velayudham started a chess coaching centre with just 10 students.
It was initially named Thiruvottiyur Chess Academy. Later, it was rebranded as Bloom Chess Academy. It was parents who were not financially well-off who flocked to this coaching centre with their children in tow.
One such parent was Nagalakshmi. She admitted both her kids to this coaching centre. Every day, she would take her kids to the coaching centre and back in a local bus.
Her husband Ramesh Babu worked at a bank. His mobility was restricted by a childhood bout of polio that left him with a disability. Overall, it was an ordinary setting.
Can extraordinary magic bloom in such a setting? Two weeks ago, both Indian men and women created history by winning gold medals at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest. Ramesh Babu’s and Nagalakshmi’s kids Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali were part of that world-beating Indian team. How did Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali, who came from modest backgrounds, reach the highest levels in the world of chess? That too, in a matter of just a few years? Does the success of these chess champions provide any lessons for India as the country prepares for a Viksit Bharat by 2047? To answer these questions, we must go back to Madras, as it was called, in the 1970s.
Back then, a six-year-old boy named Viswanathan Anand had just started playing chess. He learnt his initial lessons from his mother, Sushila Viswanathan. To teach Anand more about the board game, she enrolled Anand for chess classes at the Tal Chess Club in the Soviet Cultural Centre, Madras.
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