It was late in the evening at the gurukul of Maharishi Kashyap. Five friends, all of them eight years old, were playing a game with each other. A game suitable for the brilliant students who populated this great centre of learning. An intellectual game.
One of the students was asking questions and the others had to answer. The questioner had a stone in his hand. He tapped it on the ground once. Then he paused. Then he tapped once again. Pause. Then two times, quickly. Pause. Three times. Pause. Five times. Pause. Eight times. Pause. He looked at his friends and asked, ‘Who am I?’
His friends looked at each other, confused.
A seven-year-old boy stepped up gingerly from the back. He was dressed in rags and clearly looked out of place. ‘I think the stone taps represented 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, right? That’s the Pingala Series. Therefore, I am Rishi Pingala.’
The friends looked at the boy. He was an orphan who lived in the minuscule guard cabin of the local Mother Goddess temple. The boy was weak, suffering from malnutrition and poor health. But he was brilliant. A gurukul student named Vishwamitra had managed to convince the principal to enrol this poor orphan in the school. Vishwamitra had leveraged the power of the massive endowment that his father, the King of Kannauj, had given to the gurukul, to get this done.
The boys turned away from the orphan, even though his answer was correct.
‘We’re not interested in what you say, Vashishtha,’ sneered the boy who had asked the question. ‘Why don’t you go and clean the guard’s cabin?’
As the boys burst out laughing, Vashishtha’s body shrank in shame. But he stood his ground. Refusing to leave.
The questioner turned to his friends again and tapped the earth once. Then drew a circle around the spot he had tapped. Then he drew the circle’s diameter. Then, outside the circle, he tapped sharply once. Then, he placed the stone flat on the ground. Pause. Then he tapped the stone sharply again. Quickly. Eight times. ‘Who am I?’
Vashishtha immediately blurted out, ‘I know! You tapped the ground and drew a circle. That’s Mother Earth. Then you drew the diameter. Then you tapped 1-0-8 outside. What is 108 times the diameter of the Earth? The diameter of the Sun. I am the Sun God!’
The friends did not even turn to look at Vashishtha. Nobody acknowledged his answer.
But Vashishtha refused to be denied. ‘It’s from the Surya Siddhanta … It’s the correct answer …’
The questioner turned to face him in anger. ‘Get lost, Vashishtha!’
A loud voice was heard. ‘Hey!’
It was Vishwamitra. He may have been only eight years old, but he was already huge. Powerful enough to scare the five boys.
‘Kaushik …’ said the boy questioner nervously, using the gurukul name for Vishwamitra, ‘this has nothing to do with you …’
Vishwamitra walked up to Vashishtha and held his hand. Then, he turned to the five boys. Glaring. ‘He is a student of the gurukul now. You will call him by his gurukul name.
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