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Cracking The CAT? Use Vedic Maths: The Economic Times Online

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Cracking The CAT? Use Vedic Maths: The Economic Times Online

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Cracking the CAT?

Use Vedic maths- The Economic Times Page 1 of 2

The Economic Times Online


Printed from economictimes.indiatimes.com > News By Industry > Services> Education

Cracking the CAT? Use Vedic maths


MANU JOSEPH
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2004 12:38:06 AM]
$0 NRI Account + FREE DVD

MUMBAI: The 16 sutras of Vedic maths spell out astonishing techniques to multiply, although in an arithmetical sense. Th
have been rediscovered by an improbable breed – a youthful India whose road to the material world inescapably pass
through nasty entrance exams.

While quantitative ability may not build a nation, it is a special Indian talent that cracks some of the toughest entrance exams
the world like the IIMs ’ Common Admission Test and the IITs’ Joint Entrance Exam.

But, just two to five per cent of the hordes who write such tests ever make it. With every candidate being severely trained f
months and even years to face the entrance tests, there is a ceaseless hunt for a winning edge, any trick that would sa
computation time.

It is this desperation that has ressurrected the magical short cuts of Vedic Mathematics – a set of cryptic Sanskrit vers
rumoured to be part of the Atharvaveda, though the real origins are vehemently contested.

Prashant Chopra is a 20-year old without the advantages of genius. But when he is asked the square of 109, he answers
less than a second, "11881".

Chopra has used an intepretation of a Sanskrit verse, according to which, if he wants to find the product of two numbers th
are close to one hundred, all he has to do is add one of the numbers to the last digit of the second one.

In the case of the square of 109, this would mean 109 + 9 or 118. The next step is to attach the product of the last two digits;
the above case, 9 X 9 = 81. That's how he arrived at 11881.

"In a two-hour CAT exam," he says, "I will save 10 minutes by using Vedic maths.”

He is one of the nearly 130,000 candidates who will take CAT this year in a battle for about 1,300 seats. The usefulness
Vedic maths for MBA and even engineering entrance exams, is spawning a growing industry. Three-day workshops are bei
oversubscribed.

Books on the subject are selling as though they are steamy romances. Tirthaji Maharaj's Vedic Mathematics has sold nea
40,000 copies this year.

RP Jain, a director of the book's publisher, Motilal Banarsidass says, "The book was our best seller this year."

Teachers are mushrooming across the country. Delhi-based Pradeep Kumar, an alumnus of IIM, runs a centre called
Methods that trains over 600 students in Vedic maths and charges them Rs 1,650 to Rs 3,500 for correspondence and on
month classroom courses.

He says, "When students enroll, we give them three objective-type tests of varying difficulties. Before they learn Vedic math
the average time they take is nine to ten minutes, they attempt 90 per cent of the questions and the average correct answ
ratio is 78 per cent. After 16 hours of learning Vedic Maths, they finish the papers in 2 to 3 minutes, attempt all the questio
and get 98 percent right".

He grosses Rs. 1.5 crore a year. "The way things are going," he says, "I think the figure will be Rs 10 crore in less than tw
years".

Children under 10 too are learning Vedic maths. Their parents, who know that it is in the fate of the Indian middle class to fa
entrance exams, are introducing them early to this quaint maths.

Rajeshwari Sharma, a teacher based in Mumbai, takes Sunday lessons for such kids.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-896257,prtpage-1.cms 2/20/2006
Cracking the CAT? Use Vedic maths- The Economic Times Page 2 of 2

"They really love it because it's like magic," she says. "One boy even told me, 'It's like a big piece of cake’.”

Even the President of India pushed away the strands of silver hair from his eyes and wrote a letter to Sharma praising her boo
A Handbook on Vedic Mathematics .

"Particularly I liked Chapter four – Square Root (Vargamoola)," he said.

The return of Vedic maths is evident but there is this question of where exactly it returned from. Though the computation
system is widely believed or perceived to be from ancient Vedic scriptures, there is no visible evidence to support that claim.

In the 1960s, Tirthaji Maharaj, who was the Shankaracharya of Puri at that time, said that he had found some verses in t
Atharvaveda that led to astonishing methods of calculations.

It was he who wrote the first compilation that came to be called Vedic mathematics. Not everybody believes that the seer, w
himself had a strong background in maths, had indeed found an old treasure. The material that the holy man claimed was pa
of the Vedas was a set of 16 cryptic Sanskrit verses that could mean anything.

For example, one of the "formulae" is Ekadhikena Purvena. When translated, it simply means, "By one more than the previo
one".

But Tirtha Maharaj interpreted it in various ways and formed entertaining methods of easy multiplication. The entire Sansk
text of what is called Vedic maths is not more than fifty words.

"It is a mystery how people do not notice such simple things," says SG Dani, a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamen
Research who believes that the whole saleable system of Vedic Maths is in reality just a set of interpretations of one man.

Dani once said in a public letter signed by several noted academics, that Vedic Maths is, "neither Vedic nor maths".

But whatever be its origins, nobody denies that the Shankaracharya is saving boys and girls a lot of time in their CAT practi
tests. They may not escape the endless cycle of rebirths but may escape the cycle of retests.

©Bennett, Coleman and Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-896257,prtpage-1.cms 2/20/2006

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