Viswanathan Anand ( , Tamil: விசுவநாதன் ஆனந்த்) (born December 11, 1969) is an Indian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion. Anand is one of four players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list and he has been among the top three ranked players in the world continuously since 1997.
Recently he was awarded the second highest civilian award of India- "Padma Vibhushan". In the April 2007 FIDE Elo rating list, Anand was ranked first in the world for the first time, and he retained the number one spot in the July 2007 list with a rating of 2792, a lead of 23 points. On the current January 2008 list he has an Elo rating of 2799, which makes him number two behind Vladimir Kramnik who has the same rating but played more games in the three months before the list was published. He is the sixth person to head the rating list since its inception in 1970; the other five being Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik and Topalov. Anand became the undisputed World Chess Champion on September 29, 2007, after winning the 2007 World Chess Championship Tournament held in Mexico City. Anand finished the tournament with a score of 9/14 (+4=10-0).
