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 globa

Mar 16, 2020, 14:41 IST1 min

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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

Image by Anand: Personal archives of Viswanathan Anand

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At 15, Abhinav Bindra, India"s first Individual Olympic gold medallist, left Chandigarh and headed for the German town of Wiesbaden to train. Some years later, he ditched his plush home in favour of a small room with a bunk bed at an air force barracks-turned-training facility in Colorado Springs, US, where he got to train with and learn from US Olympic athletes. Finally, in preparation f

Image by ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images