Vishwanathan Anand learned chess at the age of six, taught by his mother, at a time when India had no strong domestic chess culture or infrastructure to support a serious young player — no regular access to top-level international competition, no established coaching pipeline, and few Indian players competing seriously on the world stage.
He became known early on for his unusually fast style of play, earning the nickname 'Lightning Kid' for the speed at which he calculated moves that took other players far longer to work out, a style that some traditionalists in the chess world initially dismissed as reckless rather than genuinely strong.
In 1988, at eighteen, he became India's first grandmaster, a title that at the time required traveling abroad extensively for qualifying tournaments, since India had almost no grandmaster-level competition of its own to gain the necessary rating points from.
He went on to become World Chess Champion multiple times across different formats between 2000 and 2012, and is widely credited with sparking a broader chess boom in India, with the country producing many more grandmasters, including several rising stars, in the decades following his own breakthrough.