VELLORE: Meet 51-year-old Ellappan of Chengalpattu. This unassuming memory geek believes that youngsters can improve their memory power with the help of Thirukural. He was in Vellore on Friday to demonstrate his memory skills to students at the Thiruvalluvar Elementary School in Gudiyattam.
“By reading, memorising and recollecting kurals (couplets), it is easy to improve one’s memory,” he told the young audience. He advised them to associate every word in the couplet with a picture, object or an incident to enable easy recollection. He encouraged students to test his skills by asking them to write a list of lot of names in an orderly manner and had a look at them for some time. Without looking at the names, he was able to identify them in the order they were written in.
Speaking to Express, Ellappan narrated how he developed his skills. After he completed schooling, he worked in a private company in Chennai and would travel by train from Chengalpattu to Chennai every day. One of his uncles had given him a Thirukural, which he would read during the journey. Within three months, he completed the book and to his surprise, was able to recollect many couplets. He tested his memory skills by requesting friends to ask him questions on the couplets.
He could recollect chapters, couplets, numbers and even specific words from a couplet. Today, he can answer 31 types of questions such as chapters, number, order, meaning and even recite couplets in the reverse order!
“Quite unexpectedly I lost my job and after marriage, I did not know how to pull along,” he said. He began to make a living out of his memory skills and started a coaching centre to train youngsters on memory power. He used Thirukural as a tool to train them. “I have trained around 300 students and 30 of them have received a State award of Rs 10,000 each for reciting the kurals,” he said.
He said that youngsters should not get carried away with advertisement gimmicks on food items that claim to increase memory power.
His mission now is to train teachers in the State to make use of kural to improve students’ memory skills and he believes that this method could be incorporated into the school system.