SPOTLIGHT ON 2 PIOS WHO KEEP MUMBAI FLAG FLYING HIGH OVERSEAS
An eight-year-old PIO boy is one of the smartest people in Britain, having entered Mensa with an IQ of 152 at the age of four.
Arav Ajaykumar, from Leicester, whose parents moved to the UK in 2009 from Mumbai, also just got a gold award and the top marks in his school for the Primary Mathematics Challenge, a logical reasoning test organised by the Mathematical Association.
His mother Varsha Ajaykumar, who was raised in Bandra and used to work as a radiologist at the Advanced Radiology Centre in Andheri, said the Primary Maths Challenge is aimed at older kids in years 5 and 6. “He is in year 4 but because he is so advanced the school let him appear for it. We were not expecting him to get the highest score in school,” she said.
Arav was born in the UK and at the age of two could count to 1,000. He told TOI: “I like maths because there is only one right answer. I was shocked when I got the result and then I was really happy. I was pretty nervous when I sat for the Mensa test, but I did not find that one difficult, it was quite easy.”
‘Don’t want Arav to became a geek’
When asked what he did apart from maths, he said: “I like to play chess and ride my bike if the weather is good. I would like to be a chess grandmaster one day.” Arav plays in the U9 Leicestershire county chess team.
The secret to being good at maths is “practising a lot”, he said and the secret to being good at chess is “understanding why your opponent does something”. The only subject he said he does not excel at at school is sport. “I like playing cricket. I just don’t like football or rugby,” he said. Arav now has one-toone tuition at his school to make sure he remains stretched.
Outside maths, Arav enjoys normal children's activities like playing video games, watching TV and Bollywood movies and reading. But he also has a penchant for solving puzzles and sums. Once he had to say exactly where 0.5678 would be on a line in a maths game and he got it exactly correct.
“He has always had a liking for numbers,” Varsha explained. “When he was about 15 months old, he would keep observing these toys with digits on them. Then he started counting very early. At 17 to 18 months he could count to 20. When he was three he joined pre-school nursery and the other children were learning to count to 10 and he could already count to 1,000. The teacher asked him to read from a book and he could read a whole passage. That was when we took him to an educational psychologist.” The psychologist, Dr Peter Congdon in Solihull, who organised Arav’s Mensa test, wrote in his report that when Arav was four he had the reading ability of an 8-year old, the spelling of a 7-year old and the maths ability of a 10-year old and that his IQ was in “very superior range at 99.5 percentile” and that he was “of very superior general intelligence”.
Varsha who moved to the UK from Juhu because her husband Ajaykumar Maliyakkal landed a job in the NHS as a consultant radiologist, said she had mixed feelings to discover her son was a genius. “Children like this constant stimulation. He keeps us on our toes. We don’t want him to become a geek ,” she said.
Fortunately Arav has plenty of friends. “He is friendly and very humble. He does not show off,” Varsha said. “We have no clue who he has inherited this from. I don’t have anyone good at maths in my family so I have no idea what he can do with it in the future either,” she added. “Maybe he will be good at coding and algorithms.”
Nasa mission challenging: Scientist
About the challenges involved in navigating the mission, he said that compared to the flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, Ultima Thule which is nearly six billion km from Pluto, would be easier since there are no objects around. “But it was not without challenge because we have never done such an encounter of an object which was unknown, small and dark. Finding the object is difficult,” he explained. Ultima Thule is a traditional name of distant places beyond the known world.
On January 1, the New Horizons spacecraft will be flying 3,500 km above the surface of Ultima Thule. This distance is three times closer to how far it was from Pluto.
Bhaskaran said that at 4am on Sunday, the navigation team, after a meeting, concluded that with regards to navigating the spacecraft, everything looked good.
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