Mihir Alexander Samuel
Samuel has an interesting ability that never fails to amaze people.
You can give him any date between the years 2000 and 2020 or 2025, and he can give you the exact day of the week that date fell on. He doesn’t look at a calendar or anything - he does it all in his head, and in seconds.
His mother calls this special gift of his the “date trick”.
“I always push him a little out of his comfort zone,” Boaz said, as she narrated a story about how she encouraged Samuel to showcase his date trick at a family get together.
Although Samuel was nervous at first and took a while to warm up on stage, he soon blew his family away.
According to Boaz, people went from seeing him as the poor kid and feeling sorry for him to seeing him as a genius.
Mihir's "date trick"
When Samuel wanted to take a course at a university in Chennai, he had to take an entrance test he was not prepared for, because Boaz said they didn’t know there would be one. Even taking that entrance test, while it may not seem like a big deal for most people, was a big step for Samuel, Boaz said. It took Samuel out of his comfort zone, and he found that he excelled at it.
Samuel grew up in a wealthy family who travel frequently. While Boaz said she didn’t realize it at first, Samuel had developed a great interest in travel and tourism over the years. He decided to do a course on this in college, after graduating from high school.
While Samuel isn’t very active on social media or social face-to-face, he is constantly on travel pages and websites like TripAdvisor and JustDial. He said he’s always posting reviews for hotels on his favorite one, TripAdvisor.
Besides travel advice, Samuel has a penchant for western classical music. His favorite composer is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but he also loves other composers like Frédéric Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi.
In fact, for his last two birthdays Samuel had famous composers on his birthday cake. In 2017, his birthday cake depicted the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, and in 2018, for his 18th birthday, Vivaldi.
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And this love for music lead him to make an unlikely friend when he was on a train from Rothenberg to Frankfurt in Germany.
Mihir's train story
While Samuel’s interest in classical music isn’t something kids his generation would be very interested in, he often gets into deep conversations about western classical music with older people during his travels.
Boaz also said she’s noticed that he talks a lot more when he doesn’t think he’s being observed by his mother.