Mohd Jehangir: the wonder kid. A Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, Aug. 11: When he was nearly eight months old, Mohd Jehangir would stare at the stars, the moon and the blue sky from the lap of his father in the family?s ramshackle home in Pipili, 20 kilometres away from Bhubaneswar.

And like any doting father, Mohd Tahir, a devout Muslim, would identify the cosmos in a lisping voice, scarcely hoping that his son would remember some of the names. To his astonishment, Jehangir would lisp whatever his father had said the previous day. Tahir was obviously impressed.

A couple of months later, when he was giving tuition to Class IV and V students in his home, little Jehangir was playing beside his father. When Tahir asked his students to name the oceans and continents in the world, nobody could tell him all the names.

The same evening, Jehangir stumped his father during dinner when he narrated the names of all the oceans and continents.

The boy, by listening carefully, had managed to memorise several things. Within a year, he knew the names of all the state capitals, the Presidents and the former Chief Justices of Supreme Court.

Now four-years-old, Jehangir has learnt four languages ? Sanskrit, Japanese, Arabic and Gujarati by listening to them on the radio and can give a speech on the Quran?s preachings for several minutes.

Jehangir?s father, who works in the dispatch section of a vernacular daily in Cuttack with an income of less than Rs 1500 a month, is at a loss to explain why his otherwise ordinary child has a photographic memory.

A student of the upper kindergarten class in DAV Public School, Jehangir is like any other playful and nervous child, happy to bite into a slab of Cadbury chocolate.

But ask him who the second President and third Prime Minister of India were, and the boy can rattle off their names in no time.

?It?s an inborn gift,? says his father, Mohd. Tahir, content to chalk it up to cosmic happenstance. ?You can?t train an ordinary four-year-old to have a memory like that.? Jehangir, on his part, doesn?t seem to think the question is worth pondering.

To him, the names of the past Presidents, the state capitals and the continents are things that come as naturally as chewing bubble gums. ?I just find it easy to remember by listening,? he said. ?It?s just always made sense to me.?

But will Jehangir end up being as flameout as most of the other child prodigies? Prodded by a demanding father and haunted by outsized expectations, Jehangir is now being treated as a wondrous curiosity.

Local TV channels have started giving him publicity. Tahir says he is not forcing his son to put in extra efforts to memorise anything.

?It?s all Allah?s benevolence. If he is destined to become great then who can stop it?? he added.