Viswanathan Anand was born in Madras,India on 11th Dec 1969 and is currently the unified World Champion and also the number one in the FIDE rating list.He learnt chess at the age of six from his mother and joined a chess club later.He played a lot of blitz games in those years, on a 'winner stays on' basis.He became famous for playing tournament games at breakneck speed.
Anand contested a match with Garry Kasparov for the PCA World Chess Championship in 1995, but lost. Three years later he won a knockout tournament in Groningen to qualify to play for the FIDE title against Anatoly Karpov, but was defeated in rapid tie-breaks.
In 1998, he won the strongest Linares tournament ever, with an average rating of 2752, making it a category 21 event. In 2000, he beat Alexei Shirov to become the FIDE World Chess Champion. He is a four-time winner of the Chess Oscar award and the 2003 FIDE World Rapid Chess Champion.