COIMBATORE: G.S. Karthik Shriram, a Standard III student of Amrita Vidyalayam, can tell the day of a date in any of the years from 2001 to 2030. While he comes out with an immediate answer for the first and last day of a month, his parents say he is working on finding the other days too.

A different child since his first year, Karthik was very fast at grasping things he heard his mother tell him.

“Even before he started talking he was able to identify many things on charts like the flags of countries, objects, etc. When he was two years old, he was able to match pictures in the magazines and newspapers with the people appearing on television,” says Jaya Shanmugam, his mother.

Once the parents identified the talent of the child, they started teaching him by buying more pictorial charts.

Since he was unable to read like any other normal child till his third year, he learnt all that he did by listening to his mother reading out names and other such information.

Even though he has an uncanny memory, he is interested more in remembering things related to numbers, geography, general knowledge and current affairs. He is not interested in mundane memory by rote.

Some of the many things he is well versed in are remembering events in their respective years, the bus routes in Coimbatore, State and country capitals, coins, languages, flowers, registration numbers, etc.

When he was in LKG, his class teacher observed him distributing books to his classmates by remembering the labels for each student, even though he could not read the names.

Though these things came to him by observing and listening or learning from charts, there is something which he has devised himself – identifying the day of the first and last date of the month falling between 2001 and 2030.

He does some sort of calculation on his nimble fingers and comes out with the answer – Tuesday – when I asked him on which day September 30, 2008 falls on.

Unfortunately for us, he is unable to explain mathematically how he does the calculation. He is able to give right answers for many of the posers.

His parents tell that he was able to do this calculation when he was five years.

“He used to keep pottering around with two or three calendars and calculate something on his fingers. Then he used to come and ask us to point out any first or last date in a month. That is how he started telling the days. Now, he is working on telling the days for all the dates of the month,” says his father G.K. Shanmugam.

With the full support of his parents, who are just matriculates, Karthik’s immediate desire is to find out a method of calculation to identify all the days of the month. His long-term desire is to become a scientist.

Though he seems to have special skills, Karthik is the normal naughty boy like any other boy his age. He loves to watch cartoons and all the children’s channels.

But, what makes him stand out is that he likes to watch with equal interest news and current affairs with his parents to update himself with the goings on in the country and the world.

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