Gaurav Tekriwal - Maths Sutra: The Art of Vedic Speed Calculation

INDIA IS A LAND with a golden heritage. It has given to the world jewels such as yoga (which is now a multibillion-dollar industry), Ayurveda (another multibillion-dollar industry) and chicken tikka (a trillion-dollar taste!).

Indians are feted worldwide for their outstanding cricket and maths skills; after all, it was we who discovered Sachin, the zero and the decimal system.

This book is about being the Sachin of the decimal system and scoring high in a limited-time competitive examination through the use of maths sutras.

Maths sutras are the secret with which ancient Indians performed their feats over 5000 years ago. This system was lost to the world until it was discovered by a scholar in the forests of south India, some fifty years ago; so it can be labelled as a twentieth-century phenomenon.

These maths sutras hold the power to speed up your calculations, give you confidence, and make maths fun and interesting. They will help you in studies just the same way the yoga sutras of Patanjali help improve ones health and the ancient wisdom of Vtsynas Kama Sutra helps one in the field of love.

So what are these sutras? Where do they actually come from? Lets explore that a bit further.

We all know that the Indian civilization is one of the oldest in the world. The Indian sages passed on their collected works orally from one generation to the other using codes which unlock various layers of meaning. They compiled four texts in Sanskrit known as the Vedasmeaningknowledge.

The Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda and the Sama Veda contain various hymns dedicated to nature gods, whereas the fourth or the Atharva Veda contains a collection of spells, incantations and speculative hymns. It is in these ancient texts that the maths sutras are found in coded form, according to the founder, Tirthaji.

Consider this song dedicated to Lord Krishna:

Gopi bhagya madhuvrata
srngiso dadhi sandhiga
khala jivita khatava
gala hala rasandara

The literal translation is as follows:O Lord anointed with the yoghurt of the milkmaids worship (Krishna) / O saviour of the fallen / O master of Shiva / please protect me.

But when you apply the numerical code and the master key to it you get the value of pi to 32 places of decimal.

Unbelievable, isnt it? Such is the power of the maths sutras, also popularly known as Vedic mathematics.

Sutras are original thoughts, spoken or written in a concise and memorable form. Maths sutras are basically short mathematical formulas dealing with arithmetic and algebra. Sixteen of these were rediscovered by Tirthaji.

But in this age of technology how relevant are these sutras?

With each passing year the scope of these maths sutras gets wider, as globally more and more students deal with maths. This has caused a full-grown numeracy crisis. Here I present some surprising data:

75.2 per cent of all the children in grade five in India cant do division (three-digits-by-one-digit problems).
Source: ASER 2012 by Pratham

73.7 per cent of all children in grade three in India cant subtract (two-digit problems with borrowing).
Source: ASER 2012 by Pratham

Almost half of British adult population have the maths skills of an eleven-year-old or less. Thats 17 million adults in the UK alone.
Source: Telegraph, UK

46.3 per cent is the maths pass rate in South Africas national senior certificate examinations. Maths is a national disaster in the country.

Such is the havoc that maths has created across countries. Most children across the world cant do maths.

This is where Vedic maths comes in with its sheer simplicity and comfort, and makes a career possible in the fields of management, engineering, banking, finance and law by helping to crack their respective examinations.

The maths sutras open up a world of possibilities for everyone. Problems which once seemed difficult and daunting are childs play now. The sutras show that, although maths problems may seem abstract and unbelievable in the beginning, they all have principles of logic behind them.

Most of the sutras are very visual when you apply them. Take thevertically and crosswise sutra, for example. The pattern can be extended to do large multiplications and even shortened to do smaller two-digit-by-two-digit sums. This visual pattern makes the sutras very easy to remember and practise.

Ive had a fascinating journey in the field of Vedic mathematics over the last fifteen years. This journey has not only introduced me to some very interesting people but also allowed me to travel the length and breadth of the world across the seven seas. And wherever I went, right from meeting kids in the slums in Dharavi in Mumbai to the grand casinos of Cape Town in South Africa to Wall Street in New York, I saw there was one thread binding them allVedic mathematics.

To a kid in Dharavi, Vedic maths is like a survival skill, because the child is expected to earn a livelihood at a very early age. Similarly, casino dealers have to be quick with calculations for obvious reasons, and the stock market people need it for split-second decisions.