Indian-American girl wins US Spelling Bee Championship

Eighth grader 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar effortlessly rattled off the spelling of ‘Laodicean’ on Thursday night to become the Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, scooping over $40,000 in cash and encyclopaedia prizes. Kavya wrote the word, which means indifferent in matters of religion, on her palm with an air pencil before rattling off the correct spelling and breaking into a warm smile.

She didn’t need the official pronouncer Jacques Bailly, who himself won the Bee as a 14-year-old in 1980, to tell her she had nailed the winning word. Kavya was the favourite to sweep the annual competition, which drew 288 spellers in the oral prelims. The fourth time was the charm for Kavya, who had finished 10th, eighth and fourth in the last three years.

“I just realised it is what I have been dreaming about all my life,” said Kavya, as her first reaction was relief after sounding out unpronounceable words like antonomasia, bouquiniste, oriflamme and guayabera with other young contenders on prime-time TV.
Bee watchers empathised with Kavya when she wiped a tear or two into her spelling coach and father M Shivashankar’s shoulder last year after she flubbed a word. Today, there were only tears of joy for the Shivashankar family as Kavya dominated the bee by spelling hydrargyrum (mercury), blancmange (a sweet pudding) and baignoire, which means the lowest tier in a theatre, without missing a beat.

Kavya had bee watchers rooting for her as girls have only won the competition twice in the last decade. She has her sights on neurosurgery and enjoys playing the violin and learning Indian classical dance. Her role model is Nupur Lala, who won the bee in 1999 and was featured in the documentary Spellbound. Lala is now research assistant at MIT’s brain and cognitive sciences lab. Lala tells champions to expect “the summer after you win the spelling bee to be a whirlwind and all the memories will start coming back after.” She told ABCNews.com that fellow “word nerds” share a “unique bond over words” that tie them together for life.

She’s right. For the next 48 hours at least, Kavya will rush from studio to studio for interviews, starting with ABC’s Good Morning America. The spelling bee is as American as Apple Pie and draws huge TV ratings. In Thursday’s television audience sat Jill Biden, vice president Joe Biden’s wife who opened the championship with an anecdote about her own bee past, telling the group of parents and participants “confidence is the most important thing you can give a child.”

Second place on Thursday went to Tim Ruiter who lost out to Kavya by misspelling “maecenas,” which means a cultural benefactor. Aishwarya Pastapur, 13, finished third, watched closely by her grandmother who had travelled from India to be a part of her grand-daughter’s big night. Fellow Indian American Sidharth Chand came second last year, but this year his bee fate was sealed by “apodyterium,” the changing room in a Roman bath complex.

There were 35 Indian American kids who converged on Washington for the contest. Altogether there have been eight Indian-American Scripps National Spelling Bee champions, including six of the past 10. The hordes of Indian spellers who regularly qualify for the competition have often prompted the US media to speculate about an Indian “geek gene” at work here. Of course, Indian parents have a gift for pushing their kids to succeed in anything that looks like school. However, some bee watchers are concerned at the pressure young competitors face.