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May 29, 2009

Indian spellers d-o-m-i-n-a-t-e

Mankato eighth-grader Daniel Halvorson was ousted Wednesday from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which came as no surprise to those who follow this sort of thing.

Daniel Halvorson was jettisoned not because he can’t spell well but because, well, his name is Daniel Halvorson.

Which is to say, it’s not Avvinash Radakrishnan, Sameer Mishra or Kavya Shivashankar, who won the title Thursday by spelling her last name.

But seriously, she won it by spelling “laodicean,” which means lukewarm or indifferent to religion or politics.

Indian-American kids dominate this thing each year; they’ve won seven of the past 11 bees.

Why some child whose family has been in this country about 16 minutes can spell “palimpsest,” “heleoplankton” and “akropodion” defies credulity.

Yet each year this South Asian kiddie cartel puts a linguistic whippin’ on all comers. How come?

Without delving too far into the minefield of ethnic stereotyping, suffice to say that Indian kids’ upbringing fuels their spelling prowess.

Put another way, if American parents prodded their offspring toward academic excellence they way they push them in sports, you’d see Ben and Betsy battling toe to toe with the likes of Nitish and Saptarshi.

Not to mention Akshay Buddiga, who in 2004 gave the national bee a bounty of publicity when he fainted dead away, got up and proceeded to correctly spell “alopecoid,” a word I accidentally pronounced the other day when I stifled a sneeze.

In the Indian-American community, I suppose, Buddiga’s stunning recovery was the sports equivalent of a kid felled by a brush-back pitch, popping up and smacking a game-winning homer.

No wonder the pressure got to young Akshay. In some Indian households, parents drill kids on spelling as if they were in some sort of Merriam-Webster dictionary boot camp.

In the 1999 documentary “Spellbound” depicting the spelling bee subculture, one Indian child’s father made the kid spell 7,000 words a day, and a relative paid 1,000 people in India to chant his name.

Two, four, six, eight — who do we appreciate? Kadakia! Kadakia! Kadakia!

The national spelling bee has taken on the aura of a sporting event, to the extent that early rounds are televised on the sports network ESPN.

That tie-in was taken to absurd lengths Thursday when, after a boy spelled his word just as time ran out, the announcer likened it to pro basketball player LeBron James sinking a winning shot at the buzzer.

Spelling isn’t a sport, of course, and its competitors aren’t athletes. Yet there’s a synergy just the same, as evidenced by the first Indian-American to win the event.

Balu Natajarian won it all 24 years ago and went on to a career with the Chicago Fire pro soccer team. As team physician.



Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com .





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