• Eight-year-old Murti has a phenomenal memory and intellectual gifts. But is Kenya-born star she a genius?
Image: MAGDALINE SAYA
Eight-year-old Murti Jignesh Patel can name all the 44 presidents of the United States of America in sequence and all 29 states of India and their capital cities.
Her parents, Jignesh Patel and mother Jalpa Patel, say at age three she already demonstrated a phenomenal memory and intellectual gifts.
Kenyan-born Murti at age three memorised temple prayers and Sanskrit Slokas.
Far more impressive was memorising the Mahabharata, one of the two Sanskrit epic poems of ancient India. This is a text of 100,000 verses.
Good memory, definitely.
Genius? Wait and see.
"I would like to be a Prime Minister of India in future," Murti says.
"She is my role model and would like to meet her someday," the girl says.
Indian's prime minister is Narendra Modi. The only two female PMs were Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984, and her daughter-in-law Sonia.
"She is so perfect that she is able to do very many things," her father says."
Murti's gift began manifesting itself when she was one and a half, her family says.
Just last year, she met India's India High Commissioner to Kenya.
"We visited India when she was just one and a half years and she could recognise the image of Mahatma Gandhi on the banknotes," Patel said.
Image: MAGDALINE SAYA
In April 2017, she participated in the Kisumu and Nairobi Patel festival and emerged the winner. This year she excelled
"She is always on top in class but we don't care much about her position. What we look at are her marks," Patel said.
Most of the times she scores 95 per cent in her subjects, her parents said.
She is not just a blessing to the parents, but her teachers at Arya School, who believe she is giving the school a high ranking.
Murti's parents believe that each parent has children who are special or unique children, and theirs is.
Some are destined to be great thinkers and innovators.
Gifted children exhibit high-performance capability in intellectual, creative, artistic, leadership capacity, or specific academic fields. They may require special services or activities to fully develop her talents.