Chennai based Prakash Vaithiyanathan has come out with a unique concept in promoting religious faith more particularly about Sri Ram in the younger minds. His book, the ‘coded Arithmetic Sheets to Discover Names of Lord Rama’ for children from standard 5 (USA and world) year 6 (UK) is selling like hot cake on the Amazon platform.
A School teacher and a breast cancer researcher, Prakash Vaithiyanathan explained the salient features and what promoted him to come out with such unique venture to your correspondent. He said “These books are first of its kind in the World on Lord Rama. We have heard everyone saying “Shree Rama”. How many of us know the meaning of the phrase “Shree Rama”? When I posed this question to few eleventh-grade students, they were just looking at each other and wondering what it could be. They, honestly admitted that they have heard their parents saying “Shree Rama” but never thought of enquiring once at least what the meaning could be. This was the starting point for my project”.
Elaborating further he said “ How nice it would be if the children from grade 1 to grade 5 across India, the Land of Rama, learn few names of Lord Rama and their meanings to begin with. As a teacher for 28 years, I can say for sure that we need more and more creative ways to get the children interested in spiritualism. It struck me instantly to make use of coded math worksheets to introduce Lord Rama’s names and their meanings. Thus, five e-books ‘Coded Arithmetic Sheets to Discover names of Lord Rama’ for grade 1 to grade 5 were born.
They are currently available through Amazon’s kindle store across the world. To locate them easily, please type the words – arithmetic, sheets, Lord, Rama – separated by spaces in the search box. To view the pages of the e-books, the child need only the free Kindle app to be installed on the smartphones or iPad or any other app compatible devices. On each sheet, there are ten problems pertaining to the grade level and for each problem a letter code is assigned. Children are expected to copy the problem correctly on a sheet of paper and work out the answers and record the letter code adjacent to the answers. At the end of the problem sheet some of the answers are given and for each one of them the corresponding letter code has to be retrieved and joined to discover a name of Lord Rama”. The book covers were designed by his student in the USA.
Prakash said that there were 30 worksheets in the book and so the children can learn 30 different names of Lord Rama and their meanings. He said “as an experiment, I requested few First grade children through an online session to try the first sheet. I told them that Lord Rama is waiting to see His name getting discovered in the very first attempt so that He doesn’t get disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised when all of them solved it correctly. They discovered the name “SHREE RAMA” and learned the meaning “ONE WHO GIVES HAPPINESS”. I told them that they can also be SHREE RAMA to their parents if they get a centum in the school math exam. All of them were smiling….”
Prakash said “I am confident when children recite the names of Lord Rama, their homes will be instantly filled with positive energy and that is very sacrosanct. It is my basic objective to help children learn, I wish to help poor cancer patients and acid attack survivors. I am planning to give 50 percent of my royalty for that cause”.
A grand temple for Sri Ram is coming up in Ayodhya. Lord Ram’s birthday is round the corner. Viewed in this contest, this book on Sri Ram will be an apt gift to children to kindle their passion to study or know our epic Ramayana and Lord Sri Ram. We have a lot of books including chitra katha, videos, and serials for them but this will be a unique concept to capture their attention and interest to answer the quiz based worksheet.
