Bhukya Chirutej Singh Rathod: 8-Year-Old Wonder girl

Eight-year-old Bhukya Chirutej Singh Rathod from Mahboobabad identifies differently from most children her age. While her friends watch cartoons or are busy attending tuitions after school, Bhukya says she is better off playing chess or exploring the world map. “She never sits still and needs to be occupied with some activity all the time,” complains her mother, but you can see her swell with pride as she talks of how her daughter made it to the India Book of Records, recently, for identifying 127 countries on the world map, within just one minute.

This was not her only achievement however. She has set two world records in the Golden Book of World Records and one in Star World Records. “It all started just last December when my mother saw that a government teacher had named the 52 countries in Asia within a certain time limit, and that person got a lot of recognition for it. Then, she thought she could do it too, and attempted it. While she was practicing, I found it interesting and I took it up,” says Bhukya, who is also a State level chess player. Her father Kiran Singh Rathod informs that she has now been given a date by the Guinness Book of World Records in March, and that she aims to identify and name all the 236 countries in two minutes.

A prodigy of sorts, Bhukya is already thinking big. “I want to become an IAS officer,” she says and adds, “I know I have a lot of time before I can be qualified to become one, I’ve learnt that if I am at that position, I can help the poor in their education.” To this, her father  says that they believe in her, since she is brilliant. “We noticed that she has a photographic memory. She needs to read them just once, and she can remember forever. She is always enthusiastic to learn new things and manages to finish all her homework by herself at school, so she has time to do other things at home. She plays with her friends too, of course. Always a straight A’s kid, she asks us to enroll her in summer camps during the holidays. She likes learning Vedic maths and the abacus, and playing chess is one of her favourite pastimes,” he says.