Viswanathan Anand - the profound genius!

I am inspired to write this blog post today because yesterday this genius - Viswanathan Anand, has defended his World Chess title for the fifth time (and fourth time in a row) since 2007! That's miles ahead of being spectacular. It's what Neil from 'How I Met Your Mother' would call it - Legen....dary!! And yet he's not as renowned in our country as he deserves to be. 

As we all know, Google searches are location/country specific and the results vary across regions. I stumbled upon this array of astonishing facts when I went to Google search on my computer. I punched in the following letters for eminent people in our country and this is what i found :

Click to Enlarge

I was exhilarated with Viswanathan’s achievement yesterday, and hence I punched his name first and pressed enter. I was shocked to look at the result. The first post from Places in India (highlighted below) is from a news channel - NDTV, and it's headline says, "Who is Viswanathan Anand"(highlighted above). That is one of the leading news channels in the country and their headline just depicts how ignorant we are about the greatest sportsperson our country possesses today (with all due respect to Sachin Tendulkar). He has carried the torch of India single handedly in the World Chess arena and has not let the fire perish until today.

Then I thought to myself, let’s give others a try; so I typed in just 3 letters to search for Sachin Tendulkar - the Demi-God of Indian as well as World cricket. And I need not enlist here the pages that I saw on the Google search page, because he needs no introduction in India.

Trust me, it gets better...

This time i had to punch in just 2 letter to search for Kareena Kapoor - an actress in Bollywood again, who belongs to a star-studded family and who is surprisingly famous even though she can get an Oscar for being unfit to act. But regardless of her acting skills she is well known to people residing in the remotest of the villages in our country.

So why don’t we know the guy who earned India such great respect globally in his sport and has been consistently doing it for so many years? Why don’t we know the guy who became India’s first grandmaster in 1987, 24 years ago? Why are we not aware of the person who was the first recipient of the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award in 1991–92, India's highest sporting honour? If we worship cricket and its demi-gods, why do we not worship the guy who was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, making him the first sportsperson to receive the award in Indian history?

I think he deserves every bit of our attention and every bit of glamour that our cricketers get for contributing far much lesser than him. I think it’s high time we divert our attention to other sportspersons in our country who have given a lot more to our country than fame, such as Viswanathan himself, Saina Nehwal, Vijender Singh, Mary Kom, etc., don’t you think? And I am sure there are many more unnoticed people who have devoted their life to earn respect for our country. I’ll try to write about as many of them as possible in the future - just a small way of acknowledging their achievements!