Scientific adviser at 13 !
By Sanjay Austa

A THREE-YEAR-old boy in a sleepy Bihar village peeped over the shoulders of his parents engrossed in sorting their domestic accounts. He took one look at the figures and not only pointed out a mistake in the calculations but also provided the correct answer. The parents were flabbergasted, but took the child’s feat as a fluke.

Now, about ten years later the toddler is a child prodigy whose mental ability has surprised the entire academic world. The wonderboy, Tathagat Avtar Tulsi, cleared the Class X exam when he was barely nine years old, his B.Sc at 11 and M.Sc at 12. Now at 13, Tulsi is appointed as Scientific Advisor at the Sulabh International where he is experimenting on one of his unique hypothese: how to convert night soil into fuel. Tulsi’s father TN Prasad recalls the humiliation he went through in trying to convince the establishment that his child was gifted with special intelligence. The chairman of the CBSE Board laughed at him when he approached him for permission to allow his nine-year-old son to sit for the Class X exam. "He said I was a madman and refused to even listen to me", laments TN Prasad.

Prasad himself a professor of Ancient History, gave up his job a few years ago, to promote his son. Leaving his village, he built a small house in a congested locality in Delhi. But the hurdles of the academic world continued to forestall him. Prasad was quoted the CBSE Board rule about the limit. "Nobody was willing to believe my son was a genius and could clear the Class X exam", he says. When nothing worked the exasperated Prasad knocked the gates of the Delhi High Court. The court gave a go-ahead and Tulsi, a class five student of Jindal Public School, Delhi, was given special permission to sit for the Class X Board examinations.

Tulsi cleared the exam in the first division, and shattered the 163-year- old world record of Britain’s Lord Calvin. Calvin had cleared the tenth exam at ten years and four months, while Tulsi was only nine years and five months old. However, for Tulsi the formalities of the school and college curriculum still remained a major stumbling block. After clearing the Class X exam, his father had to do the rounds of the Education department again to get permission to allow his son to appear for the B.Sc final exam. "People did not stop laughing at me wherever I went with my request", says Prasad. And when the permission was granted, with the intervention of the Bihar Governor, Tulsi proved his genius again. At 11 years, he cleared the B.Sc exam, and soon he sat for the M.Sc exam and passed out in December 99, when he was 12 years old.

The academic world has now begun to take Prasad’s claim more seriously. Thirteen years old, Tulsi is now often invited by University professors and scientific institutes for consultations. There is less resistance now when they chat him up on complex scientific theories. One of Tulsi’s claims is that he was calculated the exact value of pi, and knows why the Iron Pillar near Qutab Minar does not rust. He also maintains that he has discovered the smallest particle, ‘Tulitron’ which he has named after himself. He has written a book called the Electromagnetic Unification and Energy Loss Phenomena but it is all theory and it has little value unless he can prove it by experiments.

The Sulabh International appointed him scientific advisor to their institute over five months ago where Tulsi draws a handsome salary of thirty thousand, has a peon to run errands and a chauffeur driven car. The authorities at the Sulabh International watch with bated breath as Tulsi works on his project of converting night soil into fuel.

For a genius, Tulsi is modest and unassuming. According to him he does not study as much as people assume. "I study less than four hours a day, and love cricket", he says. His friends are aware that he is ‘brainy’ but treat him like one of them at play. "I love playing with my friends but I get bored when they start quizzing me about science", he adds.

But the one man who is not surprised is his father, who says his son is not a prodigy because of a freak accident of nature but that he has ‘created’ him. He claims that Tulsi’s birth has been assiduously manipulated by his experiments on himself and his wife. "I fed myself and my wife on certain herbs to insure that the baby got additional grey cells," he claims. According to him with Tulsi he has successfully established his theory that a genius can be produced. "I now know how to produce a genius and I can produce another one", he says. Prasad says that the next genius will be produced if he marries a Himachali woman. Unfazed by the criticism that he is pushing his teenage son to feed his own ego. Prasad says that he is only helping his son achieve his true potential. "He is made for big things", he says. Prasad goes on to say that his son is the reincarnation of Gautam Buddha himself. His name, Tathagat Avtar Tulsi, literally means the reincarnation of Buddha. Prasad who named him, says that his son shares five anatomical features with Gautam Buddha, similar finger prints being one of them.

Meanwhile Tulsi acknowledge his father as a greater genius who was never recognised. Brushing aside the accusation that his father was pushing him too hard, Tulsi says, "if papa had got the encouragement I am getting, he would have been the greatest genius today". As for himself he has set his eyes on proving his theories through scientific experiments soon." I want to be an Astrophysicist", he says when asked about his future.