Today, at seven, he can explain in minutest detail, the detrimental effects of large dams, take you through the paces of human evolution and divulge the secrets of the solar system just the way textbooks do. Only, Dnyaneshwar has never read any. Neither can the boy, who has no access to tomes of any sort except those prescribed for Std II, explain his intuitive knowledge. ``It just comes to me,'' he shrugs.

On the outside, Dnyaneshwar is like every other child. He enjoys school and can't wait to hurry home and disappear into the narrow, congested lanes of Dana Bazar in Jalna town, where he currently lives. But the mischief in his eyes conceals the mystifying phenomenon evolving in his brain.

He opens theconversation: ``So your name is so-and-so and you come from a city called...,'' Dyaneshwar starts, instantly throwing you off-balance. Next, he tells you about your profession and you are already on the edge of your seat, waiting for his next pronouncement.

But, with a twinkle in his eye, he says he can tell you what Bal Thackeray needs to do to win the next election. As for Pokhran, well... ``When our scientists were preparing for a blast, they outwitted the American spy satellites by creating a cover of dust over the place where the experiment was done.''

Dnyaneshwar's parents, who live in Talni village in Partur taluka, can barely scrape together a living, never mind give their son a decent education. Which is why the boy cannot identify the phenomena of which he speaks. He can only expound on them in Marathi.

Still struggling with the rudiments of English, he says Killari, the epicentre of the 1993 earthquake in Maharashtra, is not listed as a siesmic zone. ``None of the books will tell you therecould have been an earthquake. But there is a lot of activity under the surface of the earth around Killari,'' he says, admitting he has never heard of Killari but mentions it only because he has been confronted with the question.

Recounting how he learnt to write, Dnyaneshwar says he once chanced upon a man doodling in the dust with a stick. Then, to everyone's utter disbelief, the boy, just two then, simply picked up the twig and began tracing the decimal in the dust, on the way to infinity.

From that day, Dnyaneshwar has keept the village-folk spellbound, holding forth on the sun, the moon, the birds and the Puranas and occasionally recalling the days of, yes, his previous birth.

The seven-year-old often refers to the time when, more than a century ago, he was a sadhu. He says he had recently guided a group of Doubting Thomases to a cave in Partur he had never seen before but had predicted would be there. In its depths, he says, is a book he had written along with five othersadhus. ``That book, once found, will lead to a sea of information that can change the world for us,'' he adds, dismayed at not being taken seriously.

Dnyaneshwar at once lives in the past and present, with his lapses ranging from a few hundred years ago to as recently as the first half of this century. And even though he can, he dodges every question pertaining to the future.

It is no wonder, of course, that the child has a voracious appetite and an insatiable curiousity. ``What did you say, internet? What is it? Computers? Oh, I haven't seen one. The rubic cube... well can you get me one? Can you get me books...'' But no one in this small town knows how to answer his queries.

Oblivious to the tags he has collected along the way -- wonder boy, prodigy, superhuman -- Dnyaneshwar says he wants to undertake research in the United States but rues the fact that he knows no English. ``If only I could get there somehow...'' he says, sinking into a reverie.

But, mention his favourite televisionchannel and the impish smile returns to his face. ``Discovery,'' he says, his own encyclopaediac knowledge far outstripping even the most erudite documentary. And his favourite programme? ``Extreme Machines,'' he says. But naturally.