A historic achievement

VISWANATHAN ANAND'S SPECTACULAR triumph in the FIDE world chess championship final against Alexei Shirov of Spain at Teheran last Sunday may have marked the finest individual achievement ever by an Indian sportsperson in a truly competitive and genuinely international sport. The glorious new dawn that a nation of more than a billion people, starved of authentic world-beating sports heroes, had been looking forward to from the time Anand first raised hopes by winning the world junior title in 1987, was finally sighted in the Iranian capital where the Indian genius outplayed his over-awed opponent in the shortest title match in the game's history. From the President and the Prime Minister down to sports officials and lay fans, a broad cross-section of the population has hailed the 31-year old Grandmaster's achievement as something that is at once path-breaking and historic. And the man who has broken all barriers and authored one of the most extraordinary events in the history of Indian sport certainly deserves all the accolades.

In an age of relentless overstatement, when the unprecedented sports explosion has created a rising tide of hype about the games and the players, today's epochal triumphs are often tomorrow's forgotten footnotes of history. As aggressively as high sporting drama threatens to invade and occupy the memory, it quickly recedes into obscure realms. Yet, amidst all this, amidst all of sport's built-in drama, there are some events that will stand the test of time. What Anand accomplished at Teheran is one such glittering example.

The history of Indian sport is filled with bad luck stories of men and women who came up short on the brink of triumph. While winners have always been elusive there can be no doubt that many an Indian sportsperson has shown all the great qualities of world-beaters - a clear view of goals and a single-minded determination in pursuit of them, a supreme will to help keep them in the race to the top. From Vijay Merchant and Vijay Hazare down to Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar in cricket, from Wilson Jones down to Michael Ferreira and Geet Sethi in billiards, from Ramanathan Krishnan down to Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi in tennis, as well as Prakash Padukone in badminton and an array of gifted hockey players right from the days of the peerless Dhyan Chand, a long line of Indian sportspersons have had their brush with immortality on the international sports stage.

However, for a variety of reasons, few events in Indian sport can rank alongside Anand's Teheran triumph, no matter that chess is nowhere as popular a spectator sport as cricket or tennis. The real significance of what the Chennai-based genius pulled off last Sunday reaches beyond the strictly-defined boundaries of sport. Excellence of the brand Anand symbolises may be something that is remote from the average sports fan, removed as it is from his own experience structure, but the true meaning of an Indian winning the world chess championship will perhaps be better understood in the future. For, chess is just one part sport. The sport of kings is primarily deemed to be intellectual warfare. And supremacy in such an activity has a meaning all its own, something that goes beyond mere sporting supremacy and is a reflection of the intellectual wealth of a nation. That Anand's success has come in the high noon of an era of information revolution, at a time when Indian infotech companies are making a major impact on the global economy and when Indian-born entrepreneurs and professionals are being hailed as among the best in the business, may not be a mere coincidence. That the new king of what is the mother of all knowledge-based sports is an Indian is something that everybody in this country must be proud of.

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