“I want to be the next Vishy,” declared Chetna Karnani, 16, referring to Mr. Anand by his nickname. “I practice four hours every day.”
Mr. Anand is no Bollywood heartthrob or pop singer. The idol the girls were swooning over was an unassuming, bespectacled, 40-year-old world chess champion.
Mr. Anand, who has held the world title for three years, appears to have earned the fame that India usually reserves for movie stars, cricket players and politicians. The girls had come to school on a Saturday with the hope of playing a game with him.
When he arrived with a retinue of four bodyguards to protect him from getting mobbed, the star-struck students sheepishly sought his autograph and peppered him with questions about his last title match, against the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov.
Historians say chess has roots in the ancient Indian games of chaturanga and shatranj, which were widely played here at one time. But chess has never taken hold in modern India. Mr. Anand is the first Indian ever to win the championship.
But Mr. Anand’s success — he was the world junior champion at age 17 and held his first world title at age 31 — has created a groundswell of enthusiasm for the game. Amit Varma, a popular Indian blogger, equated his impact here with the following Bobby Fischer created for chess in the United States when he defeated the Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky in 1972. “As I write these words, the day after his win, the newspapers and TV channels are full of him,” Mr. Varma wrote after Mr. Anand’s recent defeat of Mr. Topalov in a column for Yahoo India. “Chess, amazingly enough, might just be on its way to becoming a spectator sport in India.”
Mr. Anand has used his fame to promote the game in India, sponsoring a nationwide network of chess clubs like the one at Ms. Karnani’s high school, Sadhu Vaswani International School for Girls in southern Delhi. Officials estimate the clubs, which are administered by an Indian education company, NIIT, have signed up 850,000 students. Mr. Anand and NIIT, which sells technology and curriculum to schools, said they hoped to reach 5 million to 10 million students in the next five years.
Unlike the organized network of chess academies that the Soviet Union created to dominate the game, the NIIT-run clubs are relatively informal and are designed as an extracurricular activity.
The goal, Mr. Anand said, is not to produce other Indian grandmasters or champions, though he welcomes that as a potential side effect. Rather, he wants to get young people interested in chess as a tool to improve their ability to focus, analyze and reason. “We are very happy to produce chess champions,” he said. “But we want to create mind champions.”
As part of the program, Mr. Anand travels around the country to meet students, play chess with them and answer their questions. He also attends an annual nationwide competition among schools with NIIT chess clubs, and tutors students who reach the regional finals and the national finals before and after their games.
On the Saturday he visited the Sadhu Vaswani school, he arrived with his bodyguards and his wife and business manager, Aruna, at 10 a.m. He gave a two-hour chess tutorial, answering questions and then simultaneously playing matches with 30 students. To compensate those who were not lucky enough to be picked to play with him, he posed for photos with them, smiling awkwardly.
In the afternoon, he was on a panel discussing whether and how much chess helps children improve their mental faculties. In the evening, he was celebrated at a dinner hosted by the chief minister of New Delhi State.
Mr. Anand, who learned to play chess from his mother when he was 6, honed his skills at an early age by playing at a chess club in the southern city of Chennai, where the game has long had a stronghold.
Driving from the school to the panel discussion, Mr. Anand said he was surprised that the students that morning had been able to ask and answer detailed questions about the moves that led to his victory over Mr. Topalov in May. “Before you had to go to a chess club to get that level of interaction,” he said. “Now, you are getting it in the school system.”
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