When most 11-year-old girls day-dream about their idols, they fantasise about Harry Styles from One Direction and write his name in love hearts all over their school exercise books.
Not Shrinidhi Prakash. She is counting down the days until she meets her very own hero, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston. She is a big fan of his work.
She hopes he will be impressed by the essay she has penned for him on economic growth, entitled Notes On Austerity. Quite clearly, Shrinidhi is no ordinary girl. This week, she beat more than 2,000 children to be crowned Britain’s first Child Genius – a sort of Mastermind-meets-Countdown, for the under 11s
Thirst for knowledge: Shrinidhi and her mother Suja
- Shrinidhi Prakash has been crowned Britain’s first Child Genius
- She can recall the order of an entire pack of 52 playing cards
- Also speaks Latin and is a world champ at Scrabble
- Her parents say she has natural talent and they do not push her
Over the four-part series, 21 finalists aged eight to 11 were tested in quick-fire rounds such as Debating, Logic, Mental Arithmetic, Spelling and General Knowledge.
Not only were the questions so hard that many were beyond plenty of adults. But the stress for the children answering them was also mercilessly recorded by cameras, which seemed to take perverse pleasure in recording their faces crumple as, one by one, they crashed out of the competition.
Even cycling gold medallist Chris Hoy, a man used to the extreme edge of competition, tweeted that these intelligence tests made ‘the Olympics seem pretty stress-free’.
Other commentators questioned the programme’s seeming failure to acknowledge that other competitors in the group might possibly be on the autistic spectrum in case it jeopardised the fun they were having at the children’s expense.
Yet despite the intense pressure, Shrinidhi thrived. Not only did she manage to recall the order of an entire pack of 52 playing cards, but in the final programme she triumphed with a winning debate speech on whether money brings happiness, correctly identified Lake Baikal in Siberia as the largest freshwater pool in the world and correctly spelled the world ‘metallurgy’.
Title holder: Shrinidhi won the Child Genius final after beating Connor aged nine and ‘human dictionary’ Ben
Shrinidhi’s achievement is all the more impressive when you consider that her first language is not even English, but Tamil, which she still speaks with her family at home, and she came to live in the UK from India only three years ago.
But the supreme irony is that of all the children in the competition, Shrinidhi appeared to be the least pushed by her parents, Suja and Raman. Indeed, the mild-mannered Indian couple looked like pussy cats compared to other tiger mothers in the show.
Shrinidhi, however, seemed to trundle through the competition in her own sweet way. Of all the children who appeared in the series, Shrinidhi, the current Under-12 World Scrabble Champion, seemed the most naturally gifted and the most rightful winner.
Champ: But her parents say she is not driven by achievement
Shrinidhi also showed early promise. By the age of three, she was already a mini media celebrity in India after she was filmed being able to remember the flags of more than 200 different countries. She had learned them by watching the flag-waving spectators at cricket matches with her father.
By five her parents noticed her talent for memory. It morphed into a precocious gift and she began using long words in English. When they introduced her to Scrabble soon after, she began trouncing players several times her age.
So when her father Raman was offered a job in IT in UK, they moved here not only to further his career but also their daughter’s – especially as she already spoke English better than 99.9 per cent of the people who live here already.
So how does Shrinidhi see her life panning out before her, now that she is officially Britain’s cleverest child?
‘I don’t see it as anything different. Because it’s part of my brain, I don’t see anything extraordinary. For me this is normal. One day I would like to study economics or etymology at university. But I would also like to have two Ferraris.’
So after being proclaimed a child genius, what is next on the agenda? Maths A-level? An early Oxbridge application? Thankfully no, says Suja: ‘It’s her Grade One Piano exam.’
source::::::mailonline.com
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