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Believe it or not -- a 14-year-old rustic lad has baffled all and sundry with his knowledge of English language in a nondescript village in Saharanpur district in Western Uttar Pradesh, about 500 km from Lucknow.
Hailing from a poor illiterate Dalit labourer's family, Rajesh has literally baffled all and sundry when one fine morning he started jabbering in fluent English.
The boy who did not know a word of English was suddenly found to be speaking the language fluently and that too with an American accent.
"The first time he did so was about nine months back and I just could not believe my ears," his school principal Shishu Pal Singh Verma told this scribe over telephone from Rampur-Manihara village, about 21 km from Saharanpur town.
Though widely believed to be a case of re-birth, Rajesh has a scientific explanation to it.
"I do not believe in re-birth because there is no scientific basis to it; I am firmly of the view that memory cannot be destroyed until the time sound waves remain in the world," he was stated to have told his principal.
Significantly, Rajesh has already written three detailed research papers -- on memory, sociology and liberalization.
"Initially, I did not take him seriously, but during the last Republic Day celebration at the school he astounded all of us by making an extempore address in fluent and chaste English," said principal Verma, who also heads the William Jefferson Clinton Science and Technology Centre, created on the school campus by a personal friend of the former US President.
"This center was set up by a trust run by NRI Vinod Gupta, who was a personal friend of the Clintons; we have about 450 students on roll between class IX and XII who are provided absolutely free education," the principal pointed out.
Verma recalls how Rajesh once narrated to him about his recurrent dreams.
"He claims to be visualizing himself in some Western country engrossed in a scientific laboratory," recounts Verma, who finds the whole affair 'totally mind-boggling.'
But even he has no clue as to how the boy suddenly turned into an Englishman at the age of 14 when usually cases of re-birth are detected at a much earlier age.
The ramshackle village school where Rajesh studied up to Class VIII was like any other rural government school in North India where standards are so low that students invariably cannot even read and write good Hindi while even fundamental knowledge of English was unthinkable.
Rajesh's father Sompal is mentally challenged, so mother Omkali and two-year older brother Kalua are the family bread-winners. They make their living by working as daily wage labourers in local agricultural fields.
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