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Journalism of Courage
In a sport like chess, where teenage prodigies emerge every week, spare a thought for Aravindh Chithambaram. The 25-year-old is experiencing the first real gust of tail wind in his career at a time when other grandmasters his age are probably searching for their second wind.
Over the course of an exhilarating few months, the Chennai-based player has been victorious in two strong events: winning the Chennai Grandmasters event late last year and the Prague Masters title last week. If the field in Chennai was loaded with players like Levon Aronian, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Arjun Erigaisi, the Prague event had players like Praggnanandhaa, Wei Yi, Anish Giri and Vincent Keymer.
Those who know him well, will tell you just how talented Aravindh has always been. His long-time coach, RB Ramesh, loves to talk about how back in 2013, when Aravindh was just 14 years old, he had predicted big things in a conversation with the legendary Susan Polgar. So big, that even Polgar sounded hesitant. Ramesh had tried to tell her that the 14-year-old was good enough to become a grandmaster in six months flat even though he was yet to complete a single International Master norm.
It was on the basis of this conviction from Ramesh that Aravindh’s mother had uprooted the family from Madurai to Chennai. Aravindh had delivered on that faith by getting all three GM norms in a span of five months. He had done something rare in the sport as well: he’d become a GM without becoming an IM.
READ MORE: How Aravindh Chithambaram overcame his ‘inner turmoil’ to justify bold predictions about his talent
His one-time roommate, Srinath Narayanan, is also among Aravindh’s admirers. Srinath gushed at length in an interview with The Indian Express about how Aravindh would walk into games at the Asian U20 tournament in Uzbekistan with barely any overnight prep and still take down exceptionally strong players.
But Aravindh’s career trajectory presents a reality check for budding chess superstars: sheer talent will only take you so far. Aravindh’s career was beset by a lack of discipline and self-confidence issues, both of which he has conquered.
READ MORE: Can India’s NextGen of chess players live up to the expectations in the era of Gukesh and Praggnannandhaa
For Aravindh, emerging victorious — and staying undefeated — at Prague happened after he overcame immense pressure building up in his own mind. He gave a measure of just how much stress he was experiencing at the Czech Republic event when asked by the organisers how he would celebrate the victory at Prague. “I’ll just sleep well tonight. I’m extremely tired. After I got the lead in the tournament, for the past two days I could not sleep at all! This has never happened to me before, I don’t know what kind of pressure I was feeling at the end.”
Regardless of what was happening inside his head, the brand of chess he was playing on the board was causing heads to turn. After the event ended, grandmaster Pravin Thipsay remarked that Aravindh’s victory over first runner-up Anish Giri at Prague reminded him of the legendary Savielly Tartakower. “Tartakower had the ability and skills to spring surprises from harmless looking positions. Aravindh’s game can be termed as the most brilliant game of 2025 so far,” Thipsay wrote in his analysis.
Chess is an unrelentingly cruel sport. In most other sporting pursuits, athletes enter their peak around 25. In chess, we have players turning grandmasters before they become a teenager and some becoming world champions before they exit their teens. This dizzying pace can leave those who cannot keep up disoriented. Vidit Gujrathi, for example, had confessed to this newspaper that he had a phase where he thought his career was over after seeing the instant success players like Gukesh and Pragg were getting.
For Indian chess, it was quite fitting that Aravindh’s success came on the same day that 18-year-old Pranav Venkatesh emerged as the World Junior Champion.
For the past few years, while the world of chess has been watching the meteoric rise of India’s prodigious trio — Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi — those who read the tea leaves well in the sport have also been bracing for the next wave of players from India to break through.
“I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet say things about how other countries (besides India) are going to have top players emerging soon, while India has only these three players right now (Gukesh, Pragg, and Arjun). But for me, the thing that’s really quite different is that when you look at the second level, below the top three, a lot of very strong players — like Raunak Sadhwani, Nihal Sarin, Aravindh and then there’s a lot of these kids like M Pranesh, who are in the 2650-2680 rating range. I expect at least one or two of them to break through,” Hikaru Nakamura had predicted in an interview with The Indian Express in October last year during the Global Chess League.
It’s fitting that Aravindh identifies so much with the pawns — those little guys who can only inch forward slowly — that his Twitter handle identifies him as the ‘pawnof64squares’. Not just because his career seems to have edged ahead slowly, but also because the pawns are the pieces that have the most potential on the battlefield of 64 squares. When they reach the end of the board at a tortoise-esque pace, they have too much scope for character development: they can promote into one of the more valued pieces like a rook or a queen.
That’s where Aravindh’s career is at the moment, at the end of the board. For those who have admired him and bet on him for years, the hope is he promotes into an all-conquering queen of the battlefield.
