“My son is six-and-a-half-years old and I’m not pushing him into anything,” said Viswanathan Anand at DRS International School on Tuesday afternoon, where he assumed the role of Edify Education’s brand ambassador.
“But I’ll inculcate curiosity in him and give him exposure to as many ideas as possible. In chess, one cannot survive only with Kings Indian defence,” said the five-time former world champion, suggesting his son would be better prepared to bounce back and face life in general with a multi-pronged approach. Tracing technology’s heightened role in the game of 64 squares, Anand said he had begun by watching the greats and reading books on the subject. Over time, computers took over and now it has moved to cloud computing. “One can now live on a remote island and still be good at chess,” he observed.
In associating with the educational chain, he saw values that ran parallel with chess, such as the three Cs, viz; character, content and competence. “Education here is not formal and the flow not only from the teacher,” he said.
On his plans for the future, Anand said he’d participate in the London Chess Classic, the World Rapid Championship and the Tata Steel Tournament in the Netherlands. Quite open to the fast changing realities of modern chess, he said higher ranked players were getting younger and the average age of the top 10 was dropping. DRS Group chairman Dayanand Agarwal described himself as a ‘metric pass’. “But I had a desire to open an educational institution that would provide education of world standards here in India,” he said of the drive that gave rise to Edify. A.K. Agarwal, director of Edify, was also present.
