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In recent years, descendants of Indian immigrants - less than 1 percent of the population - have dominated this contest, snatching first place in five of the past seven years, and making up more than 30 of the 273 contestants this year.īehind those statistics lies a beguiling story, not just of immigrant pluck, but of a craze that seems to have swept through the Indian-American community.Įxcellence in a number of fields has always had a cultural tinge - consider the prevalence of Dominicans in baseball, Jews in violin playing, Kenyans in long-distance running. If I had gotten a different word, if I had been spelling in a slightly different order, I might very well not have won.FOR many American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week's national spelling bee were not appoggiatura and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers: Anurag Kashyap, Aliya Deri, Samir Patel and Rajiv Tarigopula. (She's a surgical pathologist now.) In spelling and in life, she said, "I know a lot of it is luck of the draw. "I think some potential spellers and their families may have this idea that winning the national spelling bee is an automatic passport to success, and I really don't think that's true," Raga Ramachandran, who won in 1988, told her. In San Jose, Calif., for instance, eventual 2009 NSF senior co-champion Ramya Auroprem had to beat out 2009 NSF runner-up Sidarth Jayadev just to make it into last year's National Spelling Bee finals.Įarlier this week, NPR's Elise Hu caught up with some former Scripps winners who were long past the braces-and-flash-cards phase of their lives. That can lead to some powerhouse regional showdowns. The winner in each local bracket funnels into a pool of finalists, who repeat the same process to pick a winner. Whereas regional North South Foundation competitions are run like standardized tests-the best scores get weighted against a national average to determine the national finalists-Scripps operates more like a crazy single-elimination tournament. In areas with more gifted NSFers than competition zones, the battle to get into Scripps can be intense. You have to be more than a great speller to qualify for the National Bee-you also have to live in a school district with a sponsoring newspaper or community organization.
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In a nice explainer on the North South Foundation back in 2010, Slate said that NSF kids - thousands compete in NSF spelling events each year - might be even more dominant at the National Spelling Bee, were it not for Scripps' rules: There are a lot of kids who have done well in those contests who have then gone on to the national competition, and some of them have gone on to win." " It initially started as a means of raising funds for kids who needed education in India, and that has turned into quite the training and breeding ground.
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"They have been holding spelling bees since 1993," he said. "Really, beyond that, it's the effort put forth by the kids and their families."īut Natarajan said that a community organization called the North South Foundation was one of the biggest reasons for the dominance of young desis at the spelling bee. "The only thing I'll take credit for is helping to prove that it can be done by someone of Indian-American descent," he said.
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(He won with "milieu" and acknowledged that the words have gotten a lot harder since then.) Our play-cousins over at Tell Me More got to chat with him back in 2009. When Arvind Mahankali won the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee last night, he became the sixth consecutive Indian-American winner and the 11th in the past 15 years.īack in 1985, Balu Natarajan became the spelling bee's first Indian-American winner.