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She may be the new star on the Indian chess firmament, so to speak fourteen-year-old M Kasturi, the new Asian
Junior Girls Under - 20 champion, impressed one and all when she won the title at
Tehran in Iran on July 20. Kasthuri, who returned to Chennai on Tuesday morning, enroute to her home town Madurai, had come up triumphs over the likes of India's
International Woman Master S Meenakshi and Tania Sachdev, Iran's Shadi Paridar, and champions from Uzbekistan, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Her victims in Tehran included top seed S Meenakshi in the individual encounter.
The Asian Junior title has also given Kasthuri the International Woman Master (IWM) title. She will also be invited to play in the World Junior Girls Championship. Kasthuri, whose participation in the Asian Juniors was her first foray at international level, had won several state level titles, but is yet to win a National level title, albeit finishing close every time. She finished third in the last National Junior Girls championship.
She could not have made it to
Tehran but for the All India Chess Federation (AICF) Secretary P T Ummer Koya, using his clout with FIDE to get three Indians invited. Kasthuri, studying tenth standard, hails from a middle class family and is
the only child of P Muthukumaran, a lecturer. Desperately in need of sponsorship, she is making do with an archaic four-year-old computer with a hard disk of only 630 MB.
-UNI
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