Shoeb Khan | TNN | Feb 18, 2016, 09.42 AM IST
Jaipur: Twenty-one-year-old Suresh Kumar Sharma of Jaipur, originally a vegetable vendor, failed to crack the JEE three years ago, but at present he is the most sought-after memory trainer at coaching institutes for IITs in Jaipur and Kota. He helps enhance memory for teachers, many of whom are IITians, and best performing students at the coaching institute.
Not just this, Sharma, a first year engineering student, before his newfound fame has achieved a rare distinction of memorizing 70,030 digits of the value of Pi, which got him an entry in the Limca Book of Records recently . It took him 17.30 hours to recall all the values which is equivalent to remembering 7,000 cell phone numbers.
He claimed that his training module helps teachers and students memorize hundreds of chemical reactions, periodic table, physical and mathematical formulas, paragraph and points learning.
"I don't train them in rote learning. I make them learn different techniques which helps them to link subject content with objects, location and peg. I push them to follow the old Vedic system of learning by connecting everything with an image," said Sharma, who hails from Mansarampura village in Niwaru, Jaipur.
His life was not the same always. He has been an average student who managed to get 60% marks in Class X and 71% in Class XII, which was the hig hestever score by any student in his school and village. Having studied from a Hindi medium government school with minimum facilities, he landed in Kota after some of his friends advised him to try his luck at the coaching `mandi'.
He took admission in a coaching institute, which had the lowest fee structure and was ready to take multiple instalments in 2012.
However, within a month he found the rigorous classroom teaching added to the long study hours at home very stressful. Keeping pace with the classroom training was a challenge for him.
An event which changed his life was a suicide by a student from his hostel. "That suicide was third in last 15 days and had shocked the entire Kota including all of us. I was heartbroken to see an aggrieved family come for the body . He to ok the extreme step as he failed to score well in exams. That moment I thought of quitting my coaching and leaving Kota, but by then my family had borrowed lots of money for me," said Sharma.
He did appear in the exam and was nowhere close to the IIT score. "I realized that this is not my cup of tea. During those depressing days the only option I had was to start selling vegetables again or do something that could provide a remedy to thousands of students who struggle to memorize like I did. A ray of hope came from my grandfather, a scholar in Sanskrit, who used to share how people in Vedic period used to enhance their memory," said Sharma. He did his independent research on Vedas and modern memory enhancing tools to devise his own system to increase one's memorizing power.
