Viji all set to plot her chess moves again

CHENNAI: It has been two years and eight months since Vijayalakshmi Subburaman left competitive chess.
But the 30-year-old city-based Woman Grandmaster will be back where she belongs when she plays in the Chennai Open Grandmaster tournament, a unisex event with 28 foreign entries that begins on Sunday.
Viji, as she is popularly known, left chess when her father-cum-coach Subburaman died in 2007.She has not played since because she felt the loss of her father left her without any motivation.
Subburaman wanted his daughters — Viji, Meenakshi and Bhanupriya — to make their grade in chess and he firmly believed that the eldest of his daughters, Viji, had it in her to become a world champion.
When the girls started making headlines, the Indian chess fraternity found traces of the Polgar sisters in Hungary and the Khadilkar sisters in Mumbai.
Viji was pushed to win by her determined father, who left his job in the Tamil Nadu Transport Corporation to help his daughters’ career. So much so that when he died, Viji felt shattered and stopped playing. “It was unexpected because he was only 59,” said the Indian Airlines employee as she prepared for her first tournament since May 2007. “He was everything to me and his absence was shocking.”