Little Buddha

MOZART composed his first symphony when he was five years old. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, made many discoveries while still a teenager. William Rowan Hamilton, the Irish mathematician, could speak 13 tongues when not yet 13. But what do you make of a nine-year-old who claims that the quark is not the smallest particle of matter, that he has found a way to calculate the exact value of pi, that he can predict earthquakes 15 days in advance, and that he probably knows the as-yet-mysterious composition of the iron pillar near Qutub Minar. Not to mention parlour tricks such as determining the day of any random date of your own choosing, or juggling numbers with admirable alacrity.

Apart from his speculative (for some, nonsensical!) adventures in number theory and particle physics, Tathagat Avatar Tulsi, the child prodigy from Bihar, has created quite a sensation by appearing for high school exams. If he succeeds, he would become the world's youngest matriculate ever, upstaging the English physicist Lord Kelvin, who achieved this feat at 10 years, 4 months. Tathagat declares matter-of-factly: "I want to get into the Guinness Book of World Records and then I will aim for the Nobel Prize." News of a nine-year-old taking 10th standard exams has attracted the media from the world over. Almost everybody, from the The Times of London to AFP, not to mention almost every Indian newspaper and magazine you can think of, has visited his house, located in a shabby west Delhi suburb. The Indian educational system had almost robbed Tathagat of this distinction but

for the dogged persistence (and ambition) of his father, Tulsi Narayan Prasad, a practising advocate who once used to teach ancient history in Patna. There was not a single door of power that Prasad didn't knock on. When the CBSE and NCERT disappointed him, he approached Delhi's Lt Governor, who initialed orders to permit the boy to appear for the exam. But CBSE, being a Central Government body, turned a deaf ear. Down but not out, Prasad then sought the Prime Minister's help. But even that didn't help.

Says a bitter Prasad: "The CBSE chairman was adamant. He promised he would never allow this to happen." Finally, he decided to move the High Court. On November 21, the court ordered the CBSE to allow Tathagat to appear for the exam. Don't forget, by the way, that all this while Prasad had the Guinness record in mind. No permission, and Tathagat would have lost his chance.

And thus the path was paved for Tathagat's imminent stardom. But while he is busy writing his papers, one wonders if his theories can be taken seriously at all? One can understand the precocity of a Mozart or a Hamilton, but a child contesting the cumulative knowledge of great minds on widely disparate things? IIT Delhi mathematician K.N. Mehta dismisses Tathagat's exact value of pi as impossible. "Pi is a transcendental number whose decimals seem to go on fore-over," he says. Likewise, Shobhit Mahajan, a physicist at Delhi University, can't accept 'Tulitron', the fundamental particle posited by the boy. "I can understand a Ramanujan-like mathematical intuition but Tulitron sounds incredible," he says.

Tathagat's father is so paranoid about others stealing his son's ideas that he has stopped all interviews with scientists. He doesn't even give copies of a small note on Tathagat's ideas, presumably written by him. The only scientist to have had a tete-a-tete with Tathagat is Prof Yashpal, who remembers him to be "a bright and well-read child". Says he: "Over the two-hour conversation I had with him, I was quite impressed with his knowledge." Curiously, Prasad believes that Tathagat is probably Buddha's reincarnation (hence the name Tathagat Avatar) since all his 10 fingers have clockwise whorls, an oddity. A unique occurrence which even Buddha had, claims Prasad. Face-to-face with the child prodigy, one is curious about the happenings in his presumably precocious mind. How did conjure up his theories? What books fascinate him (he had read Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time, no matter that his understanding of Newton's laws of motion is hazy)? Does he feel claustrophobic with so much media attention? Does he fear his father?

But he disappoints with his laconic answers. As he poses for a photograph with his 486 computer gifted to him by Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, one wonders if his father is not satisfying his ambition at the expense of Tathagat's childhood.