A toddler with great observation skills
R.Rishva Narahari, a toddler from Bengaluru, Karnataka, has received appreciation from the India Book of Records for performing an exemplary feat at a very tender age of 1 year and 11 months. The child identified various flash cards, apart from reading English words, reciting rhymes, enacting action words, and imitating animal sounds. As of now, he can tell and identify more than 350 flashcards in categories including 1 to 50 numbers,11 musical instruments, 20 comic book characters, 20 vegetables, 23 fruits, 30 animals, 15 transportation, 20 shapes, 20 birds, 15 food items, 10 antonyms, 15 synonyms 6 community helpers, 6 flowers, 4 park items, 26 alphabets, 10 colours, continents, planets, 10 famous personalities and wonders of the world. He is good at enacting 23 animal sounds, counting 30 objects, reading 54 words, answering 35 GK questions, and reciting 15+ rhymes.
His father, Satya Sriram, a computer engineer at Siemens, said, “From the time we knew we would become parents, we put conscious effort to give our child the best of everything. During pregnancy days, we used to diligently listen to Garbha Sanskar audio. We tried to do a lot of research to know what could be implemented to make our child the best version of us. One thing we realized was that kids progress well if they are taught well till the age of 5. Beginning with Rishva’s birth, we used to interact with him a lot. The interactions would be about the events that were happening around him. For example, whenever we gave him a bath, we used to tell a sequence of actions like ‘let’s take a bath, are you excited?’ ‘Now I’m filling the bucket’, etc. We used to give him some sensorial activities like touching various textures, feeling hot and cold, variety of smells.”
The child was made to listen to different kinds of musical notes and mantras. For example, every night before he used to sleep, the ‘Tryambakam’ mantra was played. After a few initial days of this activity, he got accustomed to that song and would sleep on playing the mantra. Every day after bath, ‘Ganesh Strotram’ was played. His mom used to sing rhymes, mantras, and shlokas frequently in a timely schedule. She used to sing a lot of songs, and lullabies to make him sleep and to stop his crying. This helped him to develop very good auditory skills, and whenever he listens to a song or rhyme, he hums the sound of the song that he hears.
Rishva’s mother, Ratna Kumari Murala, a software engineer with Cognizant Technology Solution, said, “We made a habit to tell him stories during bedtime. In general, we try to keep him engaged by asking him questions whenever possible so that he develops logical reasoning and creativity. He got the enthusiasm and curiosity to learn new things by birth. As he was more interested and enjoyed learning, we got all the motivation to teach him new things. Some other activities that we used to do regularly were teaching him counting, logic in sizes, and some simple physical activities like moving by keeping him over a pillow, swinging him up-down, left-right gently. He started to utter a few simple words like ‘bath time’, and ‘play time’ at about 10 months. He became fond of shapes and started telling the shape names correctly. Wherever we went out he used to detect the shapes that came into his vision and he was overjoyed seeing them.”