Son of the first Asian deputy mayor of Bath, Yuvraj Kumar is blazing his own trail as a talented teenager who is already a junior chess champion in the UK
By Suvam Pal
The writer is an independent media professional who earlier worked for Headlines Today and Times Now. An avid quizzer, he has been a semifinalist on BBC World’s Mastermind India and University Challenge. He is the author of the bestselling Sachin: 501 Things You Didn’t Know About The Master Blaster and The Ultimate Olympic Quiz Book.
Dr Yukteshwar Kumar was the first councillor of Indian origin to be elected in the UK’s UNESCO world heritage city of Bath. He was also the first person of Asian descent to be elected deputy mayor of the city. He has been extremely active in community work and was voted the most influential person in Bath in 2020 by the Bath Chronicle. He regularly features in Indian, British, and Chinese media. Dr Kumar supports several charities and the University of Bath has established two awards from his council’s allowance. Besides, a library is soon going to be established in Jagdishpur in Bhojpur district of Bihar, where he grew up and completed primary education.
Dr Kumar is a founder member of the Bath Indian Society. He has organised many events in Bath and regularly appears as a panelist on Indian, Chinese and British TV and radio, chiefly talking about international relations, peace and equality. He is also the first Indian to teach Chinese at a premier Western university. He has been teaching and researching on China and Chinese for over three decades and recently published a book in both Hindi and English on the cultural revolution period in China. A Bengali edition will hit the market soon.
Master Confucius, the wise sage of China, had said several centuries ago, “有其父必有其子” meaning “Like father, like son” or “chip off the old block”.
Dr Kumar’s teenaged son, Yuvraj Kumar, too has displayed brilliance from a very young age. Also known as Prince, he took to chess just after his seventh birthday — learning under the guidance of his father. He was Combe Down School champion for several years during his primary school days and took the U100/1450 British Chess Championships crown in 2017, winning all his games. He went on to win joint first prize at the British Rapidplay Chess Championships in the U110 category in Ilkley, Leeds, the same year.
Yuvraj has been part of the English National Chess Junior Squad and represented England at the Frydek Mistek International Chess Tournament in 2019.
Besides being a child prodigy and international chess player, Yuvraj is also a prolific writer and has published articles on chess and general social issues. In November 2018, he watched the world chess championships live in London and wrote an article on the eighth game of the tournament between Carlsen and Caruana.
In 2019, when he wrote on racial discrimination in the UK, hundreds of letters of support poured in.
In 2022, when he finished his GCSE (the school-leaving exam), he was selected for scholarships and bursaries at some of the best institutions in the world but chose St Paul’s School, London, where the son of former Prime Minister David Cameron is his classmate. He has recently been selected for a six-week camp at Oxford University where five to six pre-university students from every European country are chosen for the Programme in Mathematics for Young Students (PROMYS). It is a programme designed to encourage mathematically ambitious secondary school students to explore the creative world of mathematics. Competitively selected pre-university students from around Europe gather at the University of Oxford for six weeks of rigorous mathematical activity. PROMYS is organised every year at Boston University for American students, at Oxford for European students, and at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, for Indians.
