Surat: Syndrela Das has a fixed routine. She arrives at the table tennis hall for her match, and once she’s done, she heads back to her hotel and starts to study. In less than a month, she will be appearing for her Class 10 board exams. This week however, her attention has been divided.
At the Pandit Dindayal Upadhyay Indoor Stadium in Surat, 15-year-old Das is one of the youngest players competing at the 86th Senior National Championships. But the girl from Kolkata is widely considered as one of the players to watch out for in the coming years.
She has already started to pick up the accolades though. In November, she won the Under-15 girls singles event at the WTT Youth Contender event in Lugnano, Italy, adding a trophy to her luggage that already included her school books.
“I carry my books everywhere I go,” she says to HT. “I’ve been doing a lot of preparation for mathematics while I’m here. I mostly take a break when I have to come for a match.”
Das is not the tallest player around, but she is agile and quick on her feet. She plays an attacking brand of table tennis with her backhand being a particularly sharp weapon.
Remarkably, she has been playing the sport for over 12 years. She explains that her parents used to drop her off at a nearby club in Kolkata to play with her friend on a small table.
“At that time, we just used to tap the ball to each other,” she says. “No such thing as topspin or backspin or any shot like that – I learnt that all later, when I was around 11. We just used to tap the ball around. I didn’t really find it boring because I used to play with my best friend.”
By the time she was seven, she tapped her way to her first ever title, at a mixed tournament held at her club.
“Earlier it was something I would do to spend time with my friend. But after winning that tournament, I started to get more invested in table tennis,” she says. “By the time I was 10, I started to take it more seriously and thought this was something I could do professionally.”
Table tennis soon overtook her earlier passion, swimming, which she had to let go off because she developed a skin allergy to chlorine in the water. She does however, enjoy a few quick dips during her free time.
Under the tutelage of coaches Soumyadeep Roy and Poulomi Ghatak – she trains at their academy – she won the Under-13 title at the WTT Youth Contender event in Lugnano in 2022, followed by another title in Slovenia.
More recently, the junior world No.45 won two silvers and a bronze at the youth event in Damman, Saudi Arabia in October, followed by the title-winning sojourn in Italy.
In Surat , Das, who has won Under-15, Under-17 and Under-19 national titles earlier, is competing at the Senior Nationals for the second time. The switch to the senior division though is more to gain exposure.
“I play freely because this is not my event, there’s no pressure on me,” she says. “But the seniors are scared because they don’t want to lose to someone my age. Still, I try to learn from them – how they comeback from losing positions, the time they take between points, the discipline…”
She’s learning all she can about the sport this week in Surat. But her time is still divided because of the upcoming exams. But she does get some help with her academics from her mother who is travelling with her.
Her mother is also the one who came up with the spelling for her name.
“My aunt came up with the name, but my mom decided to change the spelling,” Das adds with a laugh. “At home they call me the ‘house princess.’”
Das has a long way ahead in the sport, but she’s hoping for a fairytale journey.
