Viswanathan Anand meets Manmohan Singh
New Delhi, Dec 21 (ANI): World chess champion Viswanathan Anand met Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh here today.
He met Dr. Singh for the first time after winning the global tournament in Mexico City by beating a field that included eight of the world’s top ten chess players. Speaking about the Mind Champions Academy, a not-for-profit initiative set up as a joint initiative by Anand and NIIT Ltd to promote chess in schools, the Grandmaster said that this initiative would encourage young chess players in the country.
Currently, over a million students in more than 5000 schools across India are benefiting from this initiative.“It is a pride, if we keep the programmes like the NIIT Mind Champions Academy going. We have 150,000 students taking part in our competition. We hope in next 5-10 years, we can get that up to a million. That’s clearly the biggest way to make progress,” said Anand.
Anand, 37, won the championship in Mexico after defeating Vladimir Kramnik of Russia. Anand regained the world title after seven years with an unbeaten run in the tournament.
The Indian Grandmaster had earlier won the World Championship in 2000, but some of the sheen was taken away from that win because the chess world at that time was split between two rival world bodies.
Anand won the world junior title in 1989, becoming India’s first Grandmaster at the age of 16. (ANI)
Source: thaiindian.com
I think Anand will beat Kramnik in their match.