Nagalakshmi living her dreams through journeys of her children, Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali

As the tense form of Vaishali sits on the board, blitzing out moves against elite opponents at the Norway Chess tournament, her mother Nagalakshmi makes herself comfortable on the last seat of the playing hall in a spot that’s out of Vaishali’s eyeline.

- GNS News Agency, June 4

Walk into the playing hall on any given day of the Norway Chess tournament, and Nagalakshmi will likely be there in that exact seat for an hour after 5 pm when the games start. Her face is usually impassive. Her eyes are trained on the facsimiles of the chessboards being projected up on the walls of the playing hall at the Finansparken Bjergsted for the audience to follow the action. She admits she doesn’t understand the nuances of the sport — or even wants to understand them — but as Praggnanandhaa had said during the Tata Steel Kolkata Chess tournament in 2023, she can gauge what's going on on the board simply by the expressions on her kids’ faces.

“But these days it's getting harder to do that,” she had told The Indian Express with a chuckle last year during the Norway Chess tournament, when again, you could find her on the same seat in the playing hall during each game of Norway Chess when both of her kids, Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali, were playing. “Both my kids usually have the same expression during games these days. It's hard for me to read it now. I don’t know the game. And I don't ever want to learn the game. It's a conscious decision. If I learn the sport, then every move will be a source of tension. Because I don’t know the sport well, I'm okay.”Thanks to her two children, Nagalakshmi has lived some of the dreams she had when she was younger.