it wasnt the sun that made uttarakhands prateek yadav cover his head in mumbai last month on entering an andheri banquet hall on may 1 the rishikeshbased engineering graduate put on his cap and stuffed an a4 sheet into it in a way that made the hovering cameramen disappear from his peripheral visionpaper visor on the 29yearold athlete got down to the five tasks aka disciplines at hand one of which involved memorizing and recalling within five minutes a page full of 180 suspicious historical dates and events including 2027 french gets lost in china 1404 all beaches becomes red and closer home 1066 mumbai renamed as bombay at the end of five such fiveminute cramming exercisesahemdisciplines when the announcer called onstage the virat kohli of memory sports the a4 sheet came off but the cap stayed onthe maharashtra open memory championship 2023 was the t20 version of the mindsport in which yadav is now 12timenational champion threetime international grandmaster and holder of 18 national and three world records formally developed in the 1990s memory sport competitions are events in which participants who are called mental athletes try to memorize and recall large assortments of information spanning decks of cards to fictional historical dates typically have ten contests in the recent statewide contest organised by the world memory sports council along with growth vidyapeeth not many of the 77 participants were surprised when the memory coach from uttarakhand broke a national record by mugging up and recalling 1206 binary digits in and smashed a world record by memorizing 168 random wordsboth within five minutes eachyet i dont have superhuman qualities insists yadav who once held the mehndisporting hands of 17 pinksariclad women on a russian tv show listened to each of them recite the name of their particular henna designmilana gloria avanti ulianaand minutes later when each of the hands reached out to him from behind a curtain got just one name wrong just as an athlete does physical training to get sharper and better i do mental training says the 29yearold ma memory athlete who became enchanted with the limitless potential of the brain in college when he read that swami vivekananda could recite ten giant volumes of the encyclopedia by heartan internet rabbit hole soon introduced the shy btech student to the alternate universe of passionate german and chinese practitioners of memory sports through a website called world memory statistics their strategies such as the memory palace a memory training technique dating back to ancient greecereminded him of the time an extortionist armed with a bag filled with pins would seek a ransom in hinglish inside his head in school yadav had learnt all 195 country capitals from his atlas by splitting their names and creating outlandish movie plots around them so the philippines became fill pins and manila became money la says yadav recalling the splinters that formed the visual of the pintoting criminal all he had to do to master the art of the memory palace