Viswanathan Anand is an Indian chess Grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion. He is one of the greatest sports personalities of India. In fact Vishwanathan Anand has received the highest sports award, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award, as well as the second highest civilian award, the Padma Bibhushan, from the Government of India as recognition of his immense contribution in sports and making India taking pride in his success. 
He was born in 1969 in chennai, India. He learnt the game from his mother, susila visawanathan, at the age of six.
He held the FIDE World Chess Championship from 2000 to 2002, at a time when the world title was split. He became the undisputed World Champion in 2007 and defended his title against Vladimir Kramnik in 2008. With this win, he became the first player in chess history to have won the World Championship in three different formats: Knockout, Tournament, and Match. He then successfully defended his title in the World Chess Championship 2010 against Veselin Topalov.
Anand is one of five players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list, and in April 2007 at the age of 37, he became the world number-one for the first time. He was at the top of the world rankings five out of six times, from April 2007 to July 2008, holding the number-one ranking for a total of 15 months. He has won the annual event Monaco Amber Blindfold and Rapid Chess Championships in years 1994, 1997, 2003, 2005 and 2006. He is the only player to have won five titles of the Corus chess tournament. He is also the only player to win the blind and rapid sections of the Amber tournament in the same year (twice: in 1997 and 2005). An
and won three consecutive Advanced Chess tournaments in Leon, Spain, after Garry Kasparov introduced this form of chess in 1998, and is widely recognized as the world's best Advanced Chess player, where humans may consult a computer to aid in their calculation of variations.
His game collection, My Best Games of Chess, was published in the year 1998 and was updated in 2001.
Anand is sometimes known as the 'Tiger of Madras'.
