Kapil Dev to Prakash Padukone: Meet India's first gamechangers

Ahead of the release of Ranveer Singh's '83', a film on India's pathbreaking cricket World Cup victory, Forbes India looks at the journeys of sportspeople who flipped the switch for India on the global stage
Published: Mar 16, 2020
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Image by : Anand: Personal archives of Viswanathan Anand

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When Viswanathan Anand started playing chess, India didn't have a single grandmaster and computers were non-existent in the country. The year Anand became grandmaster, in 1988, was also the first he got to practice on a computer. “[Till then], books were the only source of chess knowledge,” says Anand. This means that his world-beating feat came from reading seminal chess literature like Chess Openings: Theory and Practice by Israel Albert Horowitz, which his sister bought for him from a local bookstore, or José Raúl Capablanca’s Chess Fundamentals, among others