It was the 1980s when veteran Indian chess players began calling Viswanathan Anand “lightning boy” because of the speed with which he calculated and executed complex moves on the board.. Anand has always been in a hurry. At the age of 15, he was the youngest Indian to win the international master title.. Outside the borders of his country, he earned another nickname: the “Madras Tiger”, the name by which the state of Chennai, where Anand was born, was known during British colonial times..
Two years later, Anand became the first Asian to win the World Junior Championship while in India he already had three consecutive national championships.. And at the age of 21, he was ahead in tournaments of chess legends such as the Russians Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov.
Anand became World Chess Champion for the first time in 2000 by defeating a Latvian-born Spanish national, Alexei Shirov, in Tehran. The Indian grandmaster would defend the title four more times until he crossed paths with Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen in 2014 and was left without a king.
The Lightning Kid, now 51, is in the news this week as he is teaming up with a group of grandmasters to play simultaneous games of chess and raise funds to fight the devastating second wave of coronavirus that is wreaking havoc in its wake. humanitarian catastrophe in India.
The All India Chess Federation (AICF) has brought together Anand and chess players Koneru Humpy , Dronavalli Harika , Nihal Sarin and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu to play games this Thursday with players who sign up for $25 in this exhibition. Whoever wants to challenge the former world champion must pay $150. The games will be broadcast live and viewers will be able to make donations.
All the money will go to Checkmate COVID, an initiative created by the AICF to buy medical supplies and take them to the regions of the country where they are most needed.. “As everyone knows, India is fighting hard against Covid-19, we have all been affected in some way.. Let's all help support India's Covid-19 relief,” Anand said in a video posted by Chess.com India.
A collapsed healthcare system
The country of Anand has collapsed with the arrival of the second wave. He is experiencing the worst scenario in what we have been in the pandemic. The images are repeated in a loop one day after another: hospitals without available beds or oxygen concentrators, improvised crematoriums in the streets…
The healthcare system has collapsed. India has reported a total of 22.9 million infections and more than 249,000 deaths. Accounts for 90% of cases and deaths in Southeast Asia. It has been exceeding 300,000 daily infections since April 21 and this Tuesday the Ministry of Health has reported 3,769 new deaths.
In addition, the viral crisis was accompanied by a strange variant that the WHO, in the words of its main scientist, Maria Van Kerkhove, yesterday described as “global concern”.. All this occurs in a country of 1.350 million inhabitants where only 2.5% of its population (34.3 million) has been vaccinated.
“India has to shut down,” Anthony Fauci, the top adviser on US coronavirus policy, said on Sunday.. “I think several of the states in India have already done that, but the chain of transmission needs to be broken.. And one of the ways to do that is to shut down,” Fauci insisted.. India’s capital, New Delhi, has been on lockdown for four weeks as residents scramble for scarce hospital beds and oxygen supplies. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding out without decreeing a mass confinement as he did in March last year.
Over the weekend, at least 40 bodies presumed to be Covid-19 victims washed up on the banks of the Ganges River near the border between the states of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous, and Bihar. In the Ganges, millions of people took dips during the Kumbh Mela festival as the second wave began to hit hard.
Dozens of countries are sending medical supplies and oxygen tanks to India. And the Defense Ministry has just announced it will recruit 400 former army doctors to support its overwhelmed health system.
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