Arvind Mahankali with his family as confetti falls around him after winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday.
OXON HILL, Maryland: Arvind Mahankali, a 13-year-old boy from Bayside Hills, New York, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday by correctly spelling “knaidel,” a kind of dumpling.
Mahankali, a student at Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School, had finished third in the contest twice before, each time stumbling on German words. This year, the packed auditorium erupted in a standing ovation when he nailed “knaidel,” which comes from German-derived Yiddish.
“I thought, ‘The German curse had turned into a German blessing,’” he said of his victory. “It means I can retire on a good note.”
Mahankali, who wants to become a quantum physicist, defeated 10 other finalists. Asked what he planned to do during his summer vacation, he said he planned to study physics.
He said he would use the $30,000 cash prize for college.
The second-place finisher was Pranav Sivakumar, 13, of Tower Lakes, New York, who attends Barrington Middle School. Sriram Hatwar, 13, from Painted Post, New York, and a student at the Alternative School for Math & Science, finished third.
Finalists were eliminated on such words as “pathognomonic,” a disease’s characteristics, “doryline,” a kind of ant, “melocoton,” a grafted peach, and “kaburi,” a land crab. Contestants bit lips and clutched hands as they spelled before a crowded ballroom. All asked for definitions, origins, and a sentence using the word. Most wrote the word on their hands or forearms with a finger before spelling them into a microphone.
Asked by pronouncer Jacques Bailly to spell “temenos,” Vismaya Kharkar, 14, from Bountiful, Utah, covered her face with her hands and rocked her head forward and backward.
Then she wrote it into her hand and, after spelling it correctly, flashed a big smile and high-fived other contestants. But Kharkar went out on “paryphodrome,” exclaiming “Oh, no!” when the bell sounded indicating a misspelling.
Amber Born, a 14-year-old from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who is home schooled, reacted with raised eyebrows when given “lansquenet,” a kind of card game. “That is cause for panic,” she said, then slowly spelled it correctly.
Mahankali won a contest that involved 11 million young spellers at some point. A total of 281 aged 8 to 14 from all 50 US states, the District of Columbia and foreign countries took part in the Bee held outside Washington.
For the first time since it started in 1927, the contest included tests on vocabulary. Organisers said the new quizzes were part of the Bee’s commitment to deepening knowledge of the English language. Since 1999, 11 of the 15 winners have been of South Asian origin, including the last six. Reuters
WASHINGTON: When, in 2010, Anamika Veeramani correctly sounded out the letters to “stromuhr” (I hadn’t heard the word before either) to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, she captured the hearts and minds of the Indian and US media alike.
This was partly thanks to her inspiring performance — and also because she had become the third Indian-American in as many years to win the prestigious competition.
“Spelling champ’s victory hat-trick for Indian-Americans,” gushed, the Hindu, an English-language daily in India.
Indian-Americans have maintained their Scripps dominance ever since, having now won the title of America’s best speller for six consecutive years. In fact, 11 of the last 14 winners have been Indian-American. This week Arvind Mahankali, 13, won the 2013 national spelling bee with the German-Yiddish word “knaidel” this week.
Indian-Americans represented around a third of this year’s semi-finalists, and two of them were siblings of past winners.
Just what accounts for this astounding success?
As it turns out, we’re not the first to ask this question. “Is it because of India’s colonial history with Britain”, wondered the Hindu back in 2010, “or is it something at the level of genetic programming?” The answer is neither as Darwinian as genetics nor as deterministic as colonialism.
Part of the explanation does have to do with education.
In India, education tends to be more rote, with an emphasis on memorisation. The Wall Street Journal quotes Sharmila Sen, a former English professor at Harvard, as saying:
The first generation immigrant parent brings with her/him a set of memories about how education works and what is to be valued. For Indians that is a memory of endless class tests doled out on a regular basis to evaluate our ability to retrieve information — spellings of words, names of world capitals, cash crops of states, length of rivers, height of mountains, and a plethora of minutiae charmingly labelled as General Knowledge.
In addition to bringing this educational emphasis to the US, highly skilled immigrants tend to enrol their children in more academically oriented extracurricular pursuits, as Forbes notes.
