Win To Give Women Wings To Fly

DIVYA Deshmukh is on a felicitation spree, meeting ministers, celebrities and the ilk. Hours and hours of practice; travelling during weekends to Chennai for special chess classes. She has done what no other woman chess player in the country had done before—win the chess World Cup.

- SWAROOP SWAMINATHAN

She will spark another revolution in chess. This time for the women's game.

At the beginning of the week, two Indian women, separated by a generation but united by their passion and excellence in chess, duelled in the final of the women's World Cup. As soon as Deshmukh, 19, and Koneru Humpy, 38, advanced to the final of one of the game's most prestigious events, it further entrenched what the 2024 women's Olympiad had shown.

The Chinese may be the foremost practitioners of women's chess but India's barrier-shattering women have closed the gap. At the Olympiad in Budapest last year, India, purely going by seedings, didn't stand a chance of winning gold. But youth and experience (Humpy, D Harika, Deshmukh, Vantika Agarwal and Tania Sachdev) combined to devastating effect. Yet, the chess fraternity wasn't too keen on announcing a change of guard because China hadn't sent their strongest contingent.