Shatranj Ke Khiladi: India's chess stars shine, backed by an NCA-style academy
Viswanathan Anand was invited to address a gathering in Bengaluru. The attendees were not chess players or coaches or sports administrators. In fact, it had nothing to do with the sport of chess. Yet, it would turn out to be a gamechanger for chess in India.
WestBridge Capital, the Bengaluru-based investment firm that had invited Anand, wanted him to talk to their investors about pattern recognition and its applicability in chess and business. It’s safe to assume that those investors went home better-informed, but chess was definitely the biggest benefactor.
During a conversation, Sandeep Singhal, the cofounder and managing partner of WestBridge Captial, suggested to Anand that they should “do something together… for Indian chess”.“He said, ‘let’s think about it’ and then a few months later he came back with an idea of setting up an elite fellowship, where we take the sort of brightest young individuals and try to help them with that last bit that can be the gap between someone who’s best in India to someone who’s best in the world,” Singhal says.
And that led to the formation of WestBridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA), a catalyst in the rise of several young Indian chess players – including the youngest World Championship contender D Gukesh – in the last couple of years.
INSPIRATION
“Sandeep gave me a pretty broad canvas to think up some ideas. We could have done a tournament or something like that, but I thought that we could try and figure out why we have so many good promising youngsters but not enough are
