MindChampion Viswanathan Anand has played simultaneous chess with multiple challengers, many times before. But the simultaneous chess that he played with 6 opponents located in cities as far apart as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, while being at the Kolkata studio of NIIT Imperia Centre for Advanced Learning, was a first-time experience for him.

NIIT Imperia used its innovative ‘Synchronous Learning’ technology to connect the recently crowned World No. 1 Vishy Anand, with chess enthusiasts, students and representatives of media across these six cities.

Vishy’s challengers across these six cities included the most-promising young members of amateur chess clubs. Aged between 8 and 18 years, many of these young players have already achieved FIDE rankings and participated in national and international events.  8-year old Harshal Shahi, the youngest player to have been rated internationally last year; Raja Surya J. (Asian under-14 Gold Medal winner); Mahalakshmi M (World under-8 Bronze Medal winner) and Sayantan Das (Sub Junior Champion) were among those who took on the World No 1.

The unique Synchronous Learning technology–-used by NIIT Imperia for its Executive Education programs—connects remote classrooms live with faculty from the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad, Calcutta and Indore. Dedicated two-way audio-video interaction systems and special software that fully replicates face-to-face teaching, lie at the core of this new teaching technology.

NIIT Brand Ambassador, Anand utilized the same teaching capabilities of this technology to conduct lively tutorials for chess enthusiasts in the six cities, during which he also analysed a few of the landmark games from his career. Using the same platform he also responded to questions from this dispersed audience, on technical aspects of chess, his professional career and the experience of being Numero Uno in World Chess.

Speaking at the media event, NIIT MindChampion Viswanathan Anand said, “It feels great to chat and play with friends across the country using NIIT Imperia’s technology, which seems to make distances disappear due to the high level of interactivity. I would love to use this medium to reach out to chess enthusiasts across the county.”

Earlier welcoming the Chess Champion, Mr. Udai Singh, Head, NIIT Imperia, said, “NIITians and students across the country join me in congratulating Vishy for his recent feat. It is an honour for NIIT Imperia to have the MindChampion at our centre and use the platform to reach out to his fans and students across the country.

NIIT is committed to bringing the best to its students—be it management education from the best B-Schools; learning experience through usage of latest and the best technology platform or World Champion like Vishy,” added Mr. Singh. Additionally, through NIIT Imperia’s partnership with IIM-Indore, the institute is offering Post Graduate Certificate Program in Sales & Marketing (1 year) and a PG Certificate Program in Management (1 year) for the batch starting June 2007.

Hundreds of working professionals comprising of middle and senior level managers have already enrolled for NIIT Imperia programs in the first six months of its inception. Nearly one-third of NIIT Imperia students come from the IT industry including top IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro, IBM, Accenture, TCS, Cognizant, Dell, Ernst & Young, Boston Consulting Group, Yahoo and Oracle. Many come from organizations in the Financial, Manufacturing and the Services sector, such as Reliance Industries, Bharti Enterprises, Dr Reddy's Labs, HSBC, HCL, HDFC, ICICI Bank, L&T, SBI, Citigroup, American Express, Godrej, ITC, Motorola, among others.