CHENNAI: Inside the cavernous playing hall at the Anna Centenary Library, Levon Aronian has just taken a walk. Facing Arjun Erigaisi, the US Grandmaster – one of the best the world has ever seen in the game – has disappeared, perhaps to help himself to a beverage.

Erigaisi is ranked World No 3, but this story isn’t about him. Nor is it about Aronian. Instead, it’s about all the players Aronian passed during his brief walk from one corner of the hall to the other.

Among them were Abhimanyu Puranik (24, rated 2652), Aravindh Chithambaram (25, rated 2706), Karthikeyan Murali (25, rated 2625), V Pranav (18, rated 2602), Pranesh (18, rated 2580), and Raunak Sadhwani (18, rated 2677). This microcosm of talent offers a glimpse into India’s burgeoning elite chess pool.

Some of these players already have glittering resumes, yet they’re still nowhere near the first-choice players for India’s top chess team.

Just ask Sadhwani, who was part of the Indian team that won third place at the 2022 Chess Olympiad in Mahabalipuram. This time, he was watching as an outsider. “Yeah, I should have been there, but it’s easy in the sense that if I don’t have the rating to match the fifth player, then I don’t deserve to be there,” he says. “That’s my thought in general.”

Sadhwani, one of the youngest to become a Grandmaster in India, knows the competition for spots is fierce. Even though he’s lost only one game this year, he admits, “My level the last two years has been okayish. I haven’t lost many games.”

Before the arrival of this golden generation – including D. Gukesh, R. Praggnanandhaa, and Erigaisi – there was Chithambaram. In a Chennai GM norm tournament held in 2013, running parallel to the title match between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen, Chithambaram, then an adolescent without even an International Master (IM) norm, won the event.

Over 10 years later, he still struggles to explain how he managed to achieve it. “I didn’t have any IM norm then. I’m still surprised how I managed to do it.”