Child prodigy: Just two good

Two-year-old Pavani Sumedha can probably sing her way through a high school exam even as teenage students sweat it out for answers.

The girl wonder from India has memorised all the 118 elements of the Periodic Table (list of chemicals and their qualities that make up our environment, such as hydrogen and oxygen in water, for example) in order and knows the names of the capitals of almost every country on Earth.

Not so Elementary

"Yaoundé," Sumedha correctly named the capital of Cameroon.

"Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, Dubnium, Seaborgium, Bohrium …" she sang out the elements.

She also knows the names of "all states and union territories" of her home country and around 40 poems by heart, her mother Lalitha said during an interview at her flat in Bur Dubai.

"We have to be careful because sometimes she’ll pick up what we argued about last week and bring it up later," added her father Satish, an engineer.

She also speaks a smattering of Filipino after overhearing two attendants in a supermarket here. "Of course, she doesn’t know the meaning – yet," Lalitha said.

Sumedha used to pick up lines of TV cartoon shows without apparently paying attention to them, her mother said.

"Intrigued, I decided to test her skills. We would sit for hours going over things like world capitals and other lists. She would get them right every time in the revisions," said Lalitha, who holds a master’s degree in physics.

Sumedha won her first contest last February in a talent show held by Emirates’ Parents Plus, a monthly magazine in Dubai.

Meanwhile, Sumedha has started learning numbers in three languages – English, Hindi and Telugu – and the names of planets in the solar system.

"I like Tom and Jerry and chocolates," Sumedha said.

"I also want a Nobel Prize."