Page 117 - The World's Best Boyfriend

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The burden of genius isn’t an easy one to carry.

Twenty-nine years of lugging it around had worn Raghuvir down. He had
stopped treating it as anything other than a curse. It was fun in the beginning, he
had to admit. The effortless exam scores, the feeling of superiority, the
unabashed admiration, it was all quite heady to be honest. But slowly, the

pressures that came with all this started to mount.
He was put into groups with other boys and girls with similar or greater

intelligence, sent to competitions where he was reduced to a really slow
computer.
And slowly, the headstart of having a greater IQ faded. Numbers stopped to
matter and hours spent teaching himself courses way ahead of his time went up.

The competition between geniuses is fierce and it stripped Raghuvir of
everything else in life. He was the only twelve-year-old who refused to go on

family vacations, or watch cartoons, make friends or even go outside and play.
Instead, he would stay locked up in his room and attempt questions of advanced
calculus. He had practically brought himself up. His parents, concerned at first,
had resigned to their kid being abnormally precocious.

The only relationships he had had were with his teachers and professors. It
wasn’t until his late teens that he learned to hold down conversations. These

were little sacrifices though. He wouldn’t give up his position as a child prodigy,
and later a promising young scientist, for anything in the world. He had got used
to the attention, the promise of a legacy he would leave behind.

He spent a good eight years of his adolescent life locked up in labs, or in his
room poring over books, research papers, publishing his own reports, criticizing
the reports of others. The scientific community is a hostile, unforgiving place.

New discoveries, inventions, technologies are frowned upon at first, looked at
with suspicion and envy; most scientists are driven by the fear of being left
behind.

But just like in every book, every movie, every play, he fell in love and
everything changed.
The girl was a young and beautiful understudy, and Raghuvir was a young,

good-looking professor. Their conversation started at the laboratory, and soon