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 othersImage by Anand: Personal archives of Viswanathan Anand
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 for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where he won his medal, Bindra converted a wedding hall in his hometown into a shooting range to simulate the gigantic arena in which the Olympic final was held. “Such large spaces overwhelm a shooter and upset their balance. That’s why I had to prepare,” says Bindra. “That’s also probably the closest I’ve come to marriage.”Image by ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images
