Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 8, 1990 TAG: 9005080260
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALESSANDRA STANLEY THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
He also likes being a third-year pre-med student at New York University, where his accelerated course of study is causing a certain uneasiness on campus.
Friedrich Ulfers, director of the Presidential Scholars program, which awarded him a full scholarship, is pleased with his pace, saying, "What if we had told Mozart he was too precocious?"
But other professors fear that the boy is being molded by his driven parents into a kind of scholastic Brooke Shields.
The whiz kid who mastered calculus at age 4 described himself on his college application form as "a prodigy with a purpose."
He wants to become the youngest graduate of medical school ever - a goal he says he set for himself five years ago after leafing through the "Guinness Book of World Records" and discovering that the record was held by an Israeli who graduated from the University of Perugia in Italy at age 18.
If Bala's 3.8 grade average and top test scores hold up and a medical school accepts him, he could graduate just two months short of his 18th birthday.
Bala, as he is known, is relieved to be out of Baltimore City College High School, where he resented the peer pressure to not excel.
"People don't study hard because they want to be popular," he said. He personally never felt slighted. "I was so novel, I wasn't just a regular nerd."
He began as a freshman last fall, and will complete his junior year this month, aided by credits for advanced work done in high school. NYU students and faculty call him "our Doogie Howser, M.D.," referring to the TV sitcom about a teen-age doctor, but Bala smiles a little sourly at the joke. He has never seen the show. He watches only network news, "Jeopardy" and "Star Trek, The Next Generation."
A quiet, poised boy who wears owlish clear-frame glasses and Velcro-snap sneakers, and sits, rapt, in lectures that drive older students to slouch and fidget, Bala doesn't stand out on campus. He is 5 feet 8 and keeps growing.
He joined NYU's Hippocratic Club and College Bowl, and is seeking appointment by students as a NYU senator at large. He has some pen pals from high school, and acquaintances at NYU, but considers his brother his best friend.
A classmate, John Belko, 20, says, "He's very quiet and studious. He seems anti-social to me; he doesn't like to talk to anyone unless he has to."
In Bala's first term, he lied about his age and told a classmate that he was 13. After exams, he assured moaning students that he, too, did "really badly" though he never has. He doesn't want his peers to make a fuss over him. He wants the world to do it.
"I worry that it is the parents that are pushing," says his physics professor, Leposava Vuskovic. "It is one thing to perform and be creative, but he just wants to get the degree."
Dr. Vuskovic, a Yugoslav who describes the movement of charged particles with the throaty passion of a Slavic dancer explaining "Giselle," says she wishes Bala would first "learn about life, become a round person." She finds him "very gifted, lovable and quite polite," but adds, "I think that deeply in his heart he is quite isolated."
His organic chemistry instructor, Robert Lancaster, describes Bala as very mature for his age, but not as mature as other students in the course.
"When things aren't going well in the lab, Bala gets very upset. One time during the first semester, he cried." Lancaster, who notes that Bala is doing above-average work but is not at the top of the class, adds, "I have to be more patient with him than other students."
Lancaster says he worries that Bala's hormones will one day collide with the pressure of medical school. "He hasn't reached adolescence yet," he notes, "I worry about his having to go through that and medical school at the same time."
Bala bristles at the suggestion that he has difficulty in some disciplines. "It's not that I find chemistry harder; it's just that physics is easier for me."
Bala was born in Vellore, India. When he was 3, his parents moved to Buffalo, N.Y. Bala was presumed a genius at birth; his older brother, Jaya Krishna, now 19 and a second-year medical student in New York, was an unusually precocious baby.
His parents had even higher expectations for their second child. When Bala was still in a crib, his parents counted to him the way some parents sing lullabies.
As his father, Ambati Murati, an industrial engineer, and his mother, Gomathi Rao, a mathematics teacher, moved around the country, from Buffalo to Orangeburg, S.C., and later, Baltimore, Bala skipped grades and excelled in every classroom.
When he was 10 he scored 750 on his math Scholastic Aptitude Test and 620 on the verbal test. (The average college-bound 12th-grader scores 500.) By then he had amassed dozens of scholastic awards, trophies and certificates of merit, which are reverently spread across the living room of his parents' small brick house in Queens.
His parents and older brother are ardent supporters of Bala's accelerated study program. Sometimes they seem like the master architects of his dream.
His father, whose aspirations to become a doctor were thwarted by his own father, changed jobs and moved to Queens so Bala could live at home, commute to NYU and apply to New York medical schools.
Murati insists he has fought school administrators all Bala's life to allow the boy to skip grades and bend school rules. If medical school admissions officers prove reluctant to take his child, "I will fight them."
It is illegal for universities to discriminate on the basis of age, but administrators concede that a 14-year-old applicant could give them pause. The youngest first-year medical student in the country this year is 17.
"I think questions might be legitimately raised about his emotional maturity," says Dr. Andrew Frantz, chairman of the admissions committee at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. "Why does he need to? Why not wait?"
Murati is not interested in waiting. "As we have set this goal," he says tightly, "even if he only gets into the worst medical school in New York, we will go for it."
Bala has a response when people tell him, and they always do, that they would never want to be treated by an 18-year-old doctor.
"I look older than my age now," he says, "so I probably will then." College girls, however, do not yet mistake him for an eligible bachelor. "That's a bit ahead of me," he says primly. "Everyone can see I don't shave."
by CNB