Bodhana’s chess dreams are off to a great start

Bengaluru: The Sivanandans don’t own a TV and aren’t really active on social media. They did, however, catch the vile comments that followed their nine-year-old daughter being picked in the England team for the chess Olympiad. A BBC post on the news on X was met with a flood of disturbing racist reactions. They spoke about the colour of her skin, her appearance and demanded she leave the country.
Bodhana, is a prodigy and now the youngest-ever to represent her country at a major international sporting event. One of five players picked for the England’s women’s team, she began her debut Olympiad campaign in Budapest with a win in Round 1 on Wednesday.
“We saw the kind of things people said after she made the Olympiad team,” Bodhana’s father Sivanandan, told HT. The family lives in Harrow, north-west London. “We didn’t let it affect us because we realise there’s no pleasing everyone. It’s like the folktale of man, son and donkey. There will always be people from India who feel she should go back and play for India or those in England who believe she should not play for the country. Either way, they’ll always be a bunch of people who will make comments.”
Soon after she was picked, her teammate and nine-time British women’s chess champion Jovanka Houska remarked that: “I’ve had a lot of players say to me that they’re terrified of playing her.” They can hardly be blamed. A nine-year-old who’s close to 2200 Elo can be scary.
An Under-8 world champion, Bodhana took to chess during the pandemic when Sivanandan’s friend who was returning to India gave him some of his belongings that he didn’t need anymore. Among them was a chess set. Bodhana was soon hooked to the pieces. “Kids can often quickly move from one interest to the next. So initially I asked her to play the free trial games available online. She exhausted them all pretty quickly,” Sivanandan, who moved to London from Bengaluru, laughs.
Since Bodhana began making rapid strides in the game, her father is often asked whether he plans on pulling her out of formal school for chess. “The thing is you go to school only once in life. What you learn in school, whether it’s social skills or just having friends with whom you can talk to about things other than chess, is hard to replicate at home. Bodhana’s friends and classmates watch a lot of football and discuss it in school. So she too likes football now. She’ll come back home from school and tell me all about it.”
Bodhana has twin sisters, who are two years younger to her and don’t quite share her love for chess. Between work, three kids, one of them a strong chess player, Sivanandan, originally from Trichy, Tamil Nadu, doesn’t get a whole lot of time to himself. With him accompanying Bodhana to tournaments around the world, the job of taking care of her sisters falls largely on his wife. “I don’t remember the last movie we watched,” he laughs.
Earlier this year, Bodhana spent time in the Hungarian capital with Judit Polgar, the greatest female chess player. They went over her games and the former world No 8 quizzed the 9-year-old and gave her puzzles to solve. “I want to become a world champion and one of the greatest players in the world,” Bodhana told Judit, in a video chess.com put out on Thursday. “So, you want to be better than Magnus Carlsen?”, Judit asked. Almost reflexively, Bodhana nodded. “I want to be the youngest Grandmaster as well so maybe I should get around 12…I think I’ll just keep correcting my mistakes instead of stressing myself.”
Sivanandan attests to it. “She doesn’t really take her wins too seriously nor do losses break her. She pretty much has a neutral reaction to both. At home too we make it a point to not really have extreme reactions to her results. Whether she wins or loses, she knows at home things are going to be just the same for her.”