SHAS­TRI BOODAN

Six months af­ter she placed third over­all in the 2013 SEA ex­ams, Nishtha Mo­han, 12, may be the youngest per­son to pass Math­e­mat­ics at the CXC lev­el.Ac­cord­ing to her moth­er Fariel Mo­han, Nishtha signed up as a pri­vate can­di­date and wrote the ex­ams in Jan­u­ary. She said her daugh­ter got the re­sults on­line ear­li­er this week that she earned a Grade One.

Nishtha shot in­to the lime­light af­ter the SEA ex­ams when her par­ents an­nounced that she was home-schooled and her for­mer school, the Freeport Pres­by­ter­ian School, did not con­tribute in any sig­nif­i­cant way to her suc­cess. Mo­han teach­es Math­e­mat­ics and Com­put­er Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T while Nishtha's fa­ther Par­manand is a com­put­er sci­ence teacher at the UWI St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus.

Nishtha's moth­er said the young­ster chose to write the CXC ex­ams to show the na­tion and young peo­ple es­pe­cial­ly that any­thing is pos­si­ble with the help of God. Mo­han said her daugh­ter is a de­vout Chris­t­ian who at­tends the Anu­grah Pres­by­ter­ian Church and spends a con­sid­er­able amount of time in prayer.

Mo­han said Nishtha puts her faith in Je­sus and prays con­stant­ly, some­times for hours. Mo­han said the suc­cess of her daugh­ter was not the child's own suc­cess but a mir­a­cle of God mak­ing the im­pos­si­ble pos­si­ble.She said oth­er young peo­ple can achieve the same mir­a­cles if they put en­er­gies in­to prayer and have faith. "Not much peo­ple re­alise that Je­sus did the mir­a­cle for Nishtha to come third (over­all in the SEA ex­am). So she tried some­thing else to show she wor­ships a God of mir­a­cles," Mo­han said.

She said her daugh­ter would not be sit­ting any oth­er ex­ams in the near fu­ture and not­ed that this was just a one-off event to prove that mir­a­cles can hap­pen.