Gone are the days when without apptitude in numerical ability one was able to survive and even earn a decent living. In today's stiff competition you need to be swift, precise, and accurate in your decisions.

There what you need is not conventional approach to problem. You should be accurately read the problem, quickly be able to analyse and effectively act on solutions. To do this one needs to be master of numbers. Conventional methods do give us solutions, but the methods are cumbersome, approach quite monotonous and some time a simple problem will have complicated solutions.

What do we do than? The answer is Mental Maths!

Mental Maths has been explored by most of the civilisations,

Chinese invented Abacus and derived Mental Maths based on virtual movements of beads of abacus in one's mind.

Koreans play with numbers on fingers, and don't need calculator for smaller calculations. The Korean techniques is called Chisenbop. Interestingly some so-called multinational companies claim to invent this technique which in not only incorrect, but misleading also.

Vedic Maths is an Indian origin ancient system which is fairly advanced in concepts and based on understanding of number properties. Once the properties of numbers are understood by students, calculations which may require 15 to 20 mins to complete by traditional methods can be solved in matter of 15 to 20 seconds! However, the techniques pre-requisite is the the student is aware of basic naunces of arithematical operations. These techniques are best for students from grade VII onwards.

Practically it has been seen that if students upto the age of 14 years pick up these techniques to varied degree of proficieny. The younger the student is, the better are the chances of success, it has been observed that if interested the students of 14 or 15 years also get tremendous advantage if they are able to persist for some time. For higher age groups some time if the pace is not set correctly than the same techniques become boring. But for younger age groups if the coaching is hurried up it puts them under unnecessary stress. The sad part of the story is that for commercial interests most of the organisations club as many as 25 students of all age group and teach them with the same material. Some times this leads either younger students loosing interest in the subject as they work with incompatible high age group or big students find it boring because they have to wait for their kid-classmates who take long time to complete their work esp in the initial months.

Few of the these traditional techniques esp traditional abacus techniques do conflict with the conventional calculation techniques taught in schools, this contradiction some times result in the state of confusion for the student. The situation becomes bad to worse when school teachers and the abacus teachers, both take a rigid stand and claim that their technique is the only right technique and needs to be followed with a sense of rigidity.

It is encouraging to note that few of the abacus companies have continuously evolved these techniques and systematically removed all the ambiguity from the traditional techniques and replaced them with students friendly techniques which are in sync with the way Maths is taught in the schools. Some of them esp in India have also integrated vedic techniques for the higher age group.

Few of such organisations, have researched the subject of Mental Maths to make these program useful and compatible with school methodology. Experts from from these organisations have studied these techniques in depth and exploited their full potential by integrating various the techniques and using them effectively for Mental maths programs as well. This initiative have resulted in schools subscribing to these programs along with their routine syllabus.

It is interesting to note that in Chisenbop technique, if you use only fingers for calculations, sums of addition and subtraction limited to 99 can only be performed.

However, I have personally used this technique on visually impaired students, who were appearing for first/second years of their graduation (B.Com). The biggest problem these students were facing was that firstly they were totally dependent on their helpers.(visually impaired students are permitted to use helpers to write their papers) for any calculations to be done in statistics etc, secondly, they were getting low marks because of the mistakes made by their helpers in feeding the numbers in calculator.

When they asked me for guidance, I only told them the techniques which we practice are powerful, only if we have faith in them. We started with definitive aim that at the end of the few months, they should be able to use these techniques in their regular statisitical problems. After few sessions, in less than four months, these students were able to do any kind of five digits calculations of addition/subtraction on fingers and in mind that too as fast as calculator. For multiplication and division with the help of Vedic techniques they are able to perform complex arithmetic calculations in their mind. However I would like to amplify that the credit does not go to us, the entire credit goes to these kids who had belief in me and the techniques I taught them. Now with sufficient practice their own classmates use them for most of the calculations or for confirmation of the results in place of Calculator! Is this not amazing?