Viswanathan Anand casts his spell on city of joy

A charmer and a champion, Viswanathan Anand is loved wherever he goes. The crowd can never get enough of him. They want his autographs and to be photographed with him. As much as possible, Anand is known to accommodate all such requests.

Kolkata’s chessloving audience won over all the participants of the Tata Steel chess and Anand was no different. As it turned out, he could produce just what the crowd wanted as he more than made up for his belowpar showing in the rapid section by winning the blitz title in a spectacular manner.

“I wanted to show the audience what is it that I do in some other part of the world all the time and it was nice to be able to do it here. It’s a different audience than everywhere else. On top of that, today was just like a dream,” Anand said on receiving the winner’s salver.

“It’s long been a dream of mine. And we have ticked the other boxes, we have good Opens (tournaments), we have strong players. But the one thing that was lacking was frequent visits by the top players in the world. Now we have that. So it meant a lot to me to be able to play here in India, and especially here in Kolkata,” said Anand.

RAKESH RAO