The parents of 10-year-old “child prodigy” K. Visalini are looking to the Tamil Nadu government to make some special arrangements to encourage the child.
Visalini, the daughter of a private company employee, Kalyanakumarasamy of Tirunelveli, was born with the tongue-tie disability on May 23, 2000. Doctors said she would need proper speech therapy to speak normally. However her mother, Sethu Ragamaliga, who worked as an announcer at All-India Radio, Tirunelveli, took it up as a challenge not only to make her child normal but to be great. With the guidance of a child specialist, Dr V.T. Rajesh of Muthamil Hospital at Palayamkottai, Tirunelveli, Ragamaliga started talking to the newborn baby. “As I was preparing for the TNPSC Group-I exam, I used to read aloud the subjects to my child,” said Ragamaliga, who believes it was her reading of the subjects to her child that made her a prodigy.
By the age of three, Visalini started reciting the 1,330 Thirukural couplets and became the centre of attraction amidst her relatives and at school. Noticing the child’s “abnormal” cleverness at learning activities, Dr Rajesh recommended that her parents take her to a psychologist to test her IQ.
“The findings from Raven’s Progressive Matrices indicated that she is 100th percentile, showing that she is intellectually superior,” said Dr Nammalvar, who added that in the Binet Kamath test of intelligence, Visalini’s mental age was found to be around 16 years at the age of nine in 2009. “Being in the field since 1968, I had only once come across an 11-year-old boy from Bangalore whose intelligent quotient was 137. Visalini having an IQ of 220 is an extraordinary case,” said Dr Nammalvar, who added that she is capable of doing even an MBBS at age 13, which, according to Visalini, is an impractical ambition. “Though my first ambition in life is to prove myself the youngest physician and treat Rajesh uncle (child specialist V.T. Rajesh) I unwillingly gave up the ambition as Rajesh uncle told me that the Indian Medical Council rules will not permit that.”