Pentala Harikrishna became India’s second grandmaster in 2001, fifteen years after Anand earned the title and two decades before the current Indian generation reached the world top. For most of those twenty years he was the country’s number-two-ranked player — a professional who anchored Indian chess through the long structural gap between Anand and the wave that produced Gukesh, Pragg, and Erigaisi.
His style is universal in the older Soviet-school sense: solid in defence, technical in endgames, with broad opening preparation that avoids sharp theoretical disputes. He won the World Junior Championship in 2004, reached his peak rating of 2770 in 2016, and spent the better part of the 2010s in the world top twenty. He represented India at every Olympiad from 2002 through 2024 and was captain of the gold-medal team in Budapest.
He has lived in Prague since 2013, where he plays for the Czech chess league and coaches at a private academy. His current activity is reduced from peak years but he remains active in the European team-event circuit and continues to feature in India’s national training apparatus for younger players.