Singing nations’ anthems — all 250
12-year-old dedicates young life to recalling, giving voice to every country on Earth’s patriotic song from memory, and on demand
“The Star-Spangled Banner” is pretty memorable, as national anthems go. So are the national anthems of Sierra Leone, Uganda and the Solomon Islands.
They’re all memorable. Such is the view of the 12-year-old boy who’s done the memorizing.
Yathaarth Murthy can do something that, apparently, no one else on Earth can do or has shown much desire to do. He can sing English translations of every national anthem from memory, all 250 of them, instantly.
Yathaarth, from Bangalore, India, was in San Francisco the other day, giving demonstrations. To stand before young Yathaarth and call out a country at random — St. Lucia, say — and hear him immediately belt out “Sons and Daughters of St. Lucia” is to be in the presence of greatness. Zimbabwe, The Chronicle called out. “Blessed be the Land of Zimbabwe,” Yathaarth sang, sweetly.
Yathaarth likes “The Star-Spangled Banner,” even though it talks about bombs and rockets and other things that blow people up, which he doesn’t endorse.
“It’s a motivational anthem,” he said. “It tells a story. It gives you goose bumps.”
Standing inches away and beaming as brightly as any rocket’s red glare was Yathaarth’s mom, Shilpa Spoorthy, an architect by profession, who acts as publicist, travel agent and chief cook and bottle washer so that her son need worry his head about nothing but anthems.
If enough people get wind of his rare talent, Yathaarth hopes, the producers of the Ellen DeGeneres TV show may
one day return his and his mother’s many calls. Yathaarth’s dream, modest enough for a young man of his gifts, is to appear on DeGeneres’ show.
“She’s really great,” Yathaarth said.
When he isn’t memorizing anthems, which isn’t often, Yathaarth appears to be a normal seventh-grader, passionate about video games, cycling and cricket. But it’s a constant struggle, he said. There isn’t much time for cricket with 250 anthems to keep cycling through the jukebox of his mind. And new countries are always coming along, like South Sudan did a few years ago, to keep an anthemologist on his toes.
“Everything comes with pressure,” he said. “If there is no pressure, there is no success.”
Two years ago, during one demonstration, he forgot the third line of the Chinese national anthem. That never happened before, and Yathaarth vowed it would never happen again, and it hasn’t, because if it did he might just as well forget about getting a callback from the DeGeneres people.
Yathaarth started memorizing anthems four years ago. After his school music teacher taught him his first four anthems and then confessed that those were all he knew, Yathaarth turned to the Internet, where all knowledge resides. It’s been a journey of discovery, and among the things that Yathaarth has discovered is that the Greek anthem has 152 verses, the Argentine anthem takes 27 minutes to sing, and the Macedonian anthem cannot legally be sung after 6 p.m.
“I don’t know what happens if you sing it after 6 p.m.,” he said. “I don’t want to find out.”
And then there’s the anthem of Kiribati, the island nation that — because of rising sea levels — may soon be swallowed by the Pacific. If that happens, Yathaarth’s mission is to prevent its anthem (“Stand up, people of Kiribati, sing with jubilation, prepare to accept responsibility ... ”) from being swallowed up, too.
“I have to remember it,” he said. “That’s my job. It wouldn’t be right to forget.”