Viswanathan Anand - Early Life

Early Life

Viswanathan Anand was born on December 11, 1969 in Mayiladuthurai, a town in Tamil Nadu. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Chennai, (formerly Madras), where he grew up. His father, Viswanathan Iyer, is a retired General Manager of Southern Railways, and his mother Susheela, housewife and chess/film/club aficionado and an influential socialite. He has an elder brother, Shivakumar who is a manager at Crompton Greaves in India and an elder sister Anuradha who is a professor at the University of Michigan. Anand is 11 years younger than his sister and 13 years younger than his brother.

He was taught to play chess by his mother and a close family friend named Deepa Ramakrishnan. He described his start in chess in a conversation with Susan Polgar:

I started when I was six. My mother taught me how to play. In fact, my mother used to do a lot for my chess. We moved to the Philippines shortly afterward. I joined the club in India and we moved to the Philippines for a year. And there they had a TV program that was on in the afternoon, one to two or something like that, when I was in school. So she would write down all the games that they showed and the puzzles, and in the evening we solved them together.

Of course my mother and her family used to play some chess, and she used to play with her younger brother, so she had some background in chess, but she never went to a club or anything like that.

So we solved all these puzzles and sent in our answers together. And they gave the prize of a book to the winner. And over the course of many months, I won so many prizes. At one point they just said take all the books you want, but don't send in any more entries.

Anand was educated at Don Bosco Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Egmore, Chennai and holds a degree of Bachelor of Commerce from Loyola College, Chennai.