One has to only ask a question and pat comes the reply from the two-year-old girl.
Rimsha Firdous knows the names of Chief Ministers of all 29 States in India, reels out the inventors of the airplane, and even knows that deficiency of haemoglobin makes a person anaemic!
Her general knowledge spans over a dozen subjects — from biology, geography, to even politics. She knows who Aristotle is, the basics of Islam as a religion. She knows Mumbai is the financial capital of India, not just the capital of Maharashtra, and she also knows that Nalanda University is in Bihar.
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In all, she knows the answers to over 1,000 questions.
Interestingly, little Rimsha lives in the mandal headquarters village of Bhela, 35 km away from the district headquarters of Adilabad.
While her father, Zubair Ahmed, is a driving instructor struggling to make ends meet, her mother, Asifunnisa, is a busy bee. She dons the role of Rimsha’s teacher, and relentlessly juggles between being a mother and a teacher, even looking after her younger son, Ruhaan, who is just 11 months old.
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Seeking a mentor
“There is a Marathi medium school in our village, and very rarely do we get to see a newspaper. I try my best to pick up bits of information whenever I go to Adilabad. For the past year or so, I have been shuttling between my village and Hyderabad trying to seek a mentor, but in vain,” the mother rues.
Ms. Asifunnisa, who is an arts graduate, says Rimsha is blessed with extraordinary retention power. “Whatever she hears stays in her head, and I am struggling to give her a good education. We can go without food too, but I know that education is a lifetime’s gift to a child,” she says.