What is the total of 54+25+18+20? Or what is the sum of sum of 13 multiplied by 19? Confused for a moment? Looking for a calculator? For 11-year-kid Tejas Suresh of Bangalore that is no-brainer and his answer is verbally delivered in couple of seconds. He was asked to recite the multiplication tables of 1242 at a press conference held in Bangalore on Saturday, April 12, 2008. This Class 6 student of Florence High School entered in the Limca Book of World Records 2008 for doing mental math like a calculator.Couple of years ago, just like any other kids or adults, Tejas required a pencil, paper and an eraser including several minutes to do such sums. That was before he signed up for a supplementary math's learning program with the Aloha India Center, Bangalore. His journey started in 2005, when he won the Aloha National Level Abacus and Mental Arithmetic competition that was held in Chennai. The same year, he topped the Karnataka championship in Bangalore, and left the then Minister of Education Ramalinga Reddy amazed by his computing skills. He also won the Aloha International Mental Arithmetic Competitions held in China in 2006, besting contestants from 13 countries including the US, Oman, China, and Malaysia. No doubt in mind that this Bangalore based boy is a quite obviously a math genius.
Now Tejas shows no strain while reciting multiplication tables of any number between 1 to 10,000. A subsidiary of Aloha International, a Malaysia-based mental arithmetic teaching academy, the Aloha India Center, housed in a leafy suburb (Kumara Park) of the garden city is one of the 600 Aloha centers in India which uses the abacus - an ancient Chinese learning frame with beads strung on wires to teach children to do math's exercises including substraction, addition, multiplication and division, with miraculous speed.
Since Tejas initiation into the abacus way of mental gymnastics, he visualizes the abacus in his mind's eye and displays astonishing speed in processing numbers.
Source : mangalorean.com
