14 DAY TRIAL // Wajih and Zohaib Ahmed are simply two children. The first one is 11 years old, while his younger brother is only 9. Despite being at an age where most of their college counterparts learn the multiplication table, they have already learned to master complicated algebra, as evidenced by the fact that Wajih has just recently won an A in A-level Further Mathematics. Not to be left behind, brother Zohaib has just won an A-grade for Maths A-level in the same exam, which makes him the youngest person in history to do so.
Signs of their unusually developed brain were obvious to their parents since they were but small children, when they solved their first mathematical problem. “When we watch it, we say, 'Look, that’s where it all began!',” Usman and his wife Saadia say for the DailyMail. At age 2, Wajih spent his afternoons on the rooms' floors, adding and subtracting numbers, with figures from 1 to 10 making up most of his otherwise-limited vocabulary.
“They appear perfectly normal. When we realized our boys were different in this way, we thought of all those other kids who are very good at maths and music and other things. They never seem normal or down-to-earth. It’s as if they’re kept in a bubble, and their gift becomes a kind of handicap. We have made a conscious effort to stop this happening with our boys. I say to them: 'Look, you have to act perfectly normally. When people meet you, the remarkable thing about you should not be your extraordinary talent. The remarkable thing should be that you appear perfectly normal – just like any other child – despite your extraordinary talent,'” Usman adds.
“The last thing we want is for our kids to be disruptive. They are part of the system. I’m very principled about that. I would not pay a single penny for their education because the system here is excellent. Children need parental support. That’s more important than sending them to an expensive school. I would rather spend time with my children than spend money on them,” he continues, explaining that he and his wife moved to England from Pakistan in the 1980s.
“But being different is a nice feeling. You feel a bit separate from others, but in a good way. People in my class might think it’s a bit weird, but I just get on with my work, and they get on with theirs,” Wajih underlines. Other than the fact that they are geniuses in the making, there is little to separate the two brothers from all the other children around them. They too have a PC and some gaming consoles, and spend their time at public schools, and not at private, more expensive ones.