India (भारत) Homeschooled Nine years old
Sanskrit in the morning. Circuits in the afternoon.
There is no contradiction in it, and he has never been told there should be. The same appetite that took him through four thousand sūtras takes him through a soldering iron, a telescope and a periodic table. He wants to be a research scientist, in nuclear fusion and space technology.
The sequence
What happened, and when.
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Age two
Memorised the capitals of every country in the world
Before school
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Age four
Memorised the periodic table
Chemistry
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Age five
Memorised the Bhagavad Gītā
All seven hundred verses, by self study, without being set the task.
Scripture
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Age six
Second nationally, at Ayodhya
Against university students, in Gītā recitation.
Competition
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Age six and seven
Tracked the International Space Station from the roof
With a telescope, working out when it would pass.
Astronomy
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Age eight
Memorised the अष्टाध्यायी, and shipped his first applications
Four thousand sūtras of Pāṇini, and GitaVardhan on the App Store and Google Play, in the same year.
Both at once
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Age nine
First nationally in अष्टाध्यायी, and built the device
Kanchipuram in March, and a working offline hardware reader designed, wired and coded alone.
Now
The other half
He built a sundial to check the time.
Cardboard, a compact disc and a length of tube. What makes it work is written in the corners: the latitude and longitude of the place it stands, 13.1 degrees north and 77.5 degrees east, and the two corrections needed to turn a shadow into Indian Standard Time, one for the longitude offset and one for the equation of time.
He runs physics and chemistry experiments at eleventh and twelfth grade level, works through intermediate algebra, and has built a working solar powered tracking watch.
In the workshop
Every circuit is wired and tested by hand, one board at a time.
Breadboards, a soldering iron and a multimeter. The ordinary, unglamorous process behind the finished apps and devices.
Space
Rockets, in every form he can get them.
Paper models of the GSLV and the PSLV, the NASA Artemis launch system built brick by brick, air shows, and the ISRO galleries.
The rest of the day
Not only at a desk.
Yoga and basketball daily. The recitation is treated as a discipline of attention, and the body gets the same attention.
Where it began
It was never presented to him as work.
His parents work in technology and finance. What they gave him was not a curriculum but permission: to follow a subject as far as it went, and to stop when it was finished rather than when a bell rang.
The daily routine still has yoga and basketball in it, and the recitation itself is treated as a discipline of attention rather than a performance.