Imagine solving 120+75- 50+78+120-100 in two minutes.
Couldn’t right? Okay, then try this -- 50+74-25+15-52... Still blank? Difficult isn’t it? Not so much however, for this six year old boy Sathvik Bhat Kakunje.
Meet Sathvik studying in class second who recently won the championship trophy, in the seventh international brain gym competition. Not only this, Sathvik has also bagged himself the third runners up in the state level competition and was the first runner up in the national level.
For this year’s international competition he had to solve 100 jumbled up questions relating to addition and subtraction. Not just this, there was a time constraint too. The time slot given to all was five minutes.
Yes, you’ve read it right, just five minutes. Sathvik succeeded in solving about 91 questions and got them all right. Ask him about his love for numbers, he says, “Maths is my favourite subject, I love doing addition and subtraction.” When asked how this love for maths developed, her mother explains proudly, “He used to come shopping with me and calculated the bill mentally, he started there and then caught up with time and practice.” It was only last year that he joined the SIP Acadmey India Pvt Ltd, where he learned abacus.
“Abacus helps enhance three R’s - register, retain and recall,” says Nagesh M S, his trainer at SIP. “We never forced anything on him, it was his passion for calculation that I insisted he gets some good training,” says Surya Kumar Kakunje, his father. “Mental maths is an aptitude which a person has, by getting a training it gets finer and the speed gets increased,” he adds. After having achieved so much in young age, we found out what he aspires to be? “I want to be a cricketer,” says Sathvik with a big smile.
“I want to be like Sachin, bat like him,” he quickly adds. “He loves watching the match and while watching he would enact the way the batsmen bat, so he doesn’t waste time, he only learns from there too,” says his mother.
Sathvik who enjoys playing cricket also has a keen interest in English. Well, he sure has a long way to go.