July 19: A nine-year-old held a full house at GD Birla Sabhagar in thrall today as he answered questions tossed at him from the audience on the black hole to the Big Bang. It was apparent why he, Kautilya Pandit, has earned the sobriquet of "Google boy" - for amassing knowledge far beyond his years.

His talent has taken him to the Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) sets and to the Haryana Assembly, as well as to Dubai, England and Nepal. After appearing recently on Sourav Ganguly's show Dadagiri, he was back in Calcutta to be felicitated by governor Keshari Nath Tripathi as part of a programme on Skipper Foundation's corporate social responsibility initiative Beti Padhao Abhiyan.

Speaking to Metro earlier in the day, his father Satish Sharma, a teacher of English grammar who ran a village school in Haryana, recalled how Kautilya learnt to read over three months in early-2013. By June, he had taken a fancy to the world map. "He asked what a world map was in connection with homework from school. When I handed him an Atlas he was so taken with it that after some days I got worried and hid it from him. But he found it and got immersed in it again. Within 25 days, he knew all the maps," said Sharma. "Only the African nations had posed a problem at the start. Their shapes are so different," little Kautilya said.

Now he can name the immediate neighbours of any country, as also their population, capital, gross domestic product, names of rivers etc.

By September, he was on television, answering GK questions from news anchors with elan.

That resulted in a KBC call-up the next month, with Amitabh Bachchan introducing him as "Mahatez, mahagyani, mahabuddhimani... (very smart, very wise, very intelligent)".

"He could not be a participant as that involved a long process. Even if he did, it would have been unfair to ask him questions on topics he had no clue about. Nor could the channel break its rules to restrict the questions to his area of knowledge. Had that happened, he would have walked off with the Rs 7 crore bounty," Sharma laughs. So he appeared as a guest but answered without given options.

Kautilya had little idea then who Bachchan was but one man impressed him a lot - A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Sharma wrote to the scientist and former President after Kautilya developed an interest in astronomy. "He taught me a lot of new things," says Kautilya, who wants to be a space scientist for now. A gold medallist in his age group in chess, a passionate cricketer and a swimmer, his aim in life keeps changing. Acting might get added to the list as he is supposed to play the young Chanakya in an upcoming TV serial.

"We let him be, only providing answers to his unending questions. Marks in school don't matter as long as his concepts are clear," Sharma says, as the boy digs into a pizza.