WITH an IQ of 168, he's brainier than Albert Einstein and can lay claim to being Australia's smartest kid.
But Sharvin Jeyendran, 13, from the Perth suburb of Butler, is no awkward genius.
"It means the world to me to have a high IQ," Sharvin said. "But I still make a lot of friends. I get on with everyone." As a bub, Malaysian-born Sharvin skipped baby talk and went straight to proper sentences.
After his family moved to Perth in   January, he enrolled at Sacred Heart College and has become fluent in French while topping every subject and practising for the world -titles in Scrabble.
The teenager, who plays the piano, swims and plays football, now wants to become a scientist and find a cure for cancer.
"I first realised how bright he was at nine months. He could walk and run like a four-year-old and he could actually speak with proper grammar and vocabulary," his mother Deva Menon said.
She and husband Jeyendran Ramachandran both studied law in the UK and are practising lawyers.
Their second child, Shireeya, 8, is musically gifted after starting to hum at six months of age and sing at 18 months.
Sharvin is in an elite club that also includes five-year-old Joshua Madugula, a NSW boy who boasts an IQ higher than 99.5 per cent of Australians and a young brother and sister with minds so sharp they struggle to be accurately tested.
They are among our brightest kids who are invading Mensa in big numbers, -boosting its membership to -record levels and transforming the exclusive intelligence club, long a staid adult society.
Mensa's doubling of young members in three years is a means of healing social wounds, giving smart kids acceptance, peer support and emotional stability.
"For years it has not been 'cool' to be intelligent in a -typical Australian schoolyard," Mensa Australia recruiting -officer Geoff Russell said.
"The kids, if they perform much better than their peers, it is very hard for them to feel socially adjusted."It is very isolating and then they start suppressing their -intelligence because they don't want to be a freak at school."