Spelling Bee, Chess and the Indian Diaspora in the USA
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
A: SPELLING BEE
South Asian Americans
Katy Steinmetz
May 28, 2015
South Asian-Americans, whose forebears immigrated from countries like India or Pakistan, have now won the Scripps National Spelling Bee eight years in a row. At one point in the 2015 final, six of the remaining seven spellers were of that ethnicity, and in the end there were two: co-champions Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam. That means that out of the last 16 years, spellers of South-Asian origin have lost only four competitions. And one Northwestern academic, Shalini Shankar says it’s not a coincidence.
Shalini Shankar, an associate professor of anthropology and Asian-American studies, spent a week with the 283 elite spellers who qualified for the bee in National Harbor, Md., continuing her research into what, exactly, might have produced this string of success. TIME spoke with Shankar about her interviews with parents, the kids’ intense preparation and how immigrant culture might lead to dominance in “brain sports.”
Which South Asian countries
Primarily India and Pakistan and Bangladesh are the countries that appear to have a lot of spellers. And when you look at South Asians in the South Asian spelling bee, it’s a range across those three countries. Occasionally from Sri Lanka as well. But once you get down to the finals or the championship level, it tends to be more spellers just from India. So Indian-Americans. Usually they are second generation. They were born in the United States to parents who are first generation Indian immigrants.
Is it a coincidence
It’s not a coincidence. These kids come from families where their parents are really well educated, many of them, and their parents really emphasize education and certain types of extracurricular activities. Combined with that, they seem to have a real love of words and language and their parents foster that.
Cultural values for academic prowess
Among the elite classes in India, both economically and socially elite, there’s a real emphasis on education and the use of education for social mobility. It’s not so different from other places in the world, but it’s certainly quite prevalent there. So v alue is one that gets very magnified when you look at what Indian-American populations actually emigrated. It’s mostly professionals who immigrated post-1965. They are doctors or engineers or scientists, etcetera. So they are absolutely going to place a higher value on that than, say, other types of accomplishment. It doesn’t meant they downplay other types of accomplishments, but there’s an understood value of education that these contests jibe with very well.
Intense dedication
Unless you really love language and reading and words, it becomes very hard to care about preparing to the extent that one needs to for a spelling bee at this level. Kids who do this love words and they love thinking about words. They read the dictionary, among other things. And not all of them prepare to win. They set their own goals, like ‘I want to make it to Scripps’ or ‘I want to make it to the semi-finals’ or the finals and proportionately spend time preparing in whatever ways they think will allow them to attain those goals.
Parental pressure
The parents are definitely facilitators to this process but they can’t actually produce champions. They can only enable their children to excel in this activity if they’re predisposed and dedicated to doing it themselves. But that’s so different from spelling bee champions of any other race or ethnicity. Any time you see spellers who really are dedicated and they’re making it to the highest levels of competition at the national level, generally their parents have invested a tremendous amount of time and energy helping them. There is a lot of prestige in this community to winning something like a spelling bee or winning a geography bee or a math bee. And that is valued as much if not more than winning some sort of physical sport … These are very important bragging rights among South Asian-American communities. There’s some real status linked to it, that the kids feel too. The kids are really excited about the prospect of being on ESPN. They want to be on television.
Parents' income level
There is at least one professional parent in most of these families that have what they call elite spellers. So they’re certainly socially upwardly mobile families even if they may not be wealthy, per se.
Extracurricular activities
The parents spend a lot of their time and resources taking [their kids] to participate in what some of them describe as brain sports. So rather that going to travel baseball or travel soccer, they’re traveling this academic competition loop. Part of why you’re seeing their success on the rise is they’re in constant preparation mode for these various academic competitions. And there are several competitions that are exclusively for children of South Asian parentage. So they have more opportunities to do what they’re doing.
Preparation process
That process is usually every day, if not almost every day, they spend a few hours after school, after their homework, sometimes after their parents get home so they can quiz them. They spend several hours each weekend day preparing, maybe not year-round but certainly in the weeks and months leading up to the bee. Some of these spellers who compete in their school bees as well as these South Asian spelling bees, they don’t let too much time go by when they don’t have to be preparing for something. They’re kind of constantly keeping this fresh in their minds. So it’s an ongoing process for them, during the years in which they’re able to compete. And then suddenly it ends when they’re 14. It can be a very abrupt ending.
Effect on childhood
If anything, the continuum of what childhood means is being expanded in productive ways to accommodate things that might have seemed extremely marginal or relegated to this untouchable nerd kind of activity. It’s something that has more mainstream cachet. I mean, being on ESPN is something very few kids get to do and these kids are very proud of participating in something that has such national recognition. It’s just expanding our ideas about what childhood means in ways that are keeping up with how the world is changing.
2008-2019: Indians win every Spelling Bee
From: June 2, 2019: The Times of India
See graphic :
2008-2019: Indians and the Spelling Bee
2015: 88th US National Scripps Howard Spelling Bee
The Times of India, May 30 2015
Desi kids win spelling bee title for the eighth successive year
Chidanand Rajghatta
America should rename Merriam-Webster to Shivashankar-Venkatachalam English Dictionary , went a widely distributed joke on social media after two IndianAmerican kids blew past the competition to be declared joint winners of the 88th US National Scripps Howard Spelling Bee championships. It marked the eighth successive year that Indian-American students have taken the title, extending a winning streak that began in 2008. Indian-origin children have now bagged the title in 13 of the past 16 years, starting 1999 when Nupur Lala won the nerdy word crown.
Vanya Shivshankar and Gokul Venkatachalam, both 13, spelled every word thrown at them with aplomb till the judges ran out of time and words and declared them joint winners. They were the last two standing among 285 finalists who came to Washington DC for the widely-followed event that has become something of rite of passage for school children, and a specialty for Indian-origin children.
Such is the ethnic Indian dominance of the competition now that 60 of the 285 finalists (more than one-in-five) who made it to the Capital (from a pool of 11 million of school children across the nation and beyond) were of Indian-origin; 25 of the 49 who made it to the final televised segment on the last day were Indian-Americans, and then it was seven out of the final 10 under the klieglights, making it a foregone conclusion that one of them would win.
Even allowing for such dominance, Kavya Shivshankar and Gokul Venkatachalam were extraordinary , silkily slaying words such as myrmotherine (feeding on ants), hippocrepiform (shaped like a horseshoe), bruxellois (a native or resident of Brussels), pyrrhuloxia (a genus of birds), and scherenschnitte (the art of cutting paper into decorative designs).
As it happened in 2014, the Indian-American win was followed by snarky and thinlydisguised bigotry and stereotyping on the social media.
Indo-American dominance on a rise
The Times of India, May 29 2015
Young guns: 25 of 49 spelling bee finalists are Indian-Americans
Chidanand Rajghatta
They are not alphanerds steeped only in words, their parents do not lock them up and starve them till they have learned the whole dictionary by rote, and they don't bandy words such as rescissible and faineancy in everyday conversation. In fact, outside of the few days when absorbed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee championship that got underway, they are all-rounders who perform jazz, dance, climb mountains, play sports and do everything regular kids do -and usually , they do it better.
The impression that young word-meisters are obsessed in little else other than learning obscure words by rote to win the national spelling bee crown gained currency through a suspenseful 2002 documentary called Spell bound. The NRI family of one of the eight characters the film chronicles is so consumed with winning that they hire special tutors to coach him and conduct special pujas in India for his success -in vain.
But Nupur Lala, who won the Bee title the year the documentary trailed eight participants is today a cancer researcher in Houston, on track after her childhood ambition to go to medical school. An accomplished violinist, she joked in a 2013 AP interview that the Bee competition can actually be distracting for a career because “there are so many interesting things in the dictionary to study.“
On, it became highly likely that an Indian origin kid might win the title for the eighth year in succession, as 25 of 49 finalists re maining at the time of writing are Indian-Americans; `Desi' kids have won the title in 12 of the last 15 years.
But with success has also come envy and resentment.Racist trolls derided IndianAmerican winners last year with one baiter suggesting that participation be restricted to Americans. The attacks have worried the organisers so much that they addressed the issue at a briefing ahead of the competition this week, with Indian-Americans kids already dominating the field.
“I look forward to the day , as do many of our South Asian participants, when they are called what they want to be called -Americans,“ bee director Paige Kimble, the 1981 champion, said.“The bee is one of the truest forms of meritocracy , and we support every kid no matter where they come from.“
2016: National Spelling Bee
PIOs win 14 of 18 championships
The Times of India, May 28 2016
Chidanand Rajghatta
PIOs spell `gesellschaft' & `feldenkrais', win US contest
To no one's great surprise, two Indian-American kids were declared joint winners of the 2016 US National Spelling Bee championships, making it the that PIO offspring have won the title of a wordy contest they have come to dominate.
JairamHathwar of New York and NiharSaireddyJanga of Texas duked it out for more than 20 rounds, crushing words such as `kjeldahl', `guignolet', `euchologion' and `romyshlennik', before organisers called a truce and awarded them $ 40,000 each in prize money and with the trophy shared.
It was the third successive year that there have been joint winners, pointing to increased mastery of words by kids that is proving hard for the organizers to trip, resulting in setting limits in rounds and time (also for telecast reasons). Thursday's finale ran well past 10.30 pm EST as the 10 finalists, seven of them IndianAmerican, held a nationwide audience in thrall with their verbal prowess.
Indian-American kids have now won 14 of the last 18 championships, leading an ESPN writer to call them the “New England Patriots of the Spelling Bee,“ after a champion American football team. Add to this eight of the 11National Geography Bee titles, including the last five, it leaves them with a reputation as masters of rote learning and general knowledge.
As it happens every year, the “desi“ dominance in such competitions led to the usual questions: Why are Indian-American kids so good at it? Is it all about rote learning? And what use are such obscure words in everyday life?
Answers offered range from community enterprise and enthusiasm generated from the recognition the first few winners got to peer pressure and the desire for mainstreaming through what was once an all-American school ritual.
Some others have attributed it to obsessive parenting, while others simply point to the prize money , scholarship, and a shiny resume that comes with winning in a system where college education is becoming increasingly expensive. Most previous winners have done brilliantly in their academic life. The top prize is now close to $50,000 with plenty of frills and media exposure, in part because the championships, both at the national and state level, are sponsored by media companies.
2019: When Spelling Bee ran out of words
Amy Harmon and Alan Blinder, June 2, 2019: The Times of India
Spelling Bee ran out of words, and this desi duo is to blame
HOW A $600 SERVICE BROKE THE 472K-WORD DICTIONARY
Seemingly unfazed by the stage lights and TV cameras, one gifted adolescent after the next approached the microphone and without a hint of timidity correctly spelled daunting words like “erysipelas” and “aiguillette.”
In the end, after 20 rounds had distilled a group of 562 competitive spellers to just eight, those who were left remained in a merciless logjam. On Thursday night, after the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee announced that it was running out of challenging words, each was crowned the winner in an eight-way tie.
It turned out the winners had more in common than an aptitude for spelling: Six of them had relied on SpellPundit, a coaching company started last year by two former competitive spellers, the teenage siblings Shobha and Shourav Dasari of Texas.
One of the “octochamps,” Sohum Sukhatankar, 13, of Dallas said he had spent about 30 hours a week studying the 120,000 words SpellPundit had culled from the 472,000 words in the dictionary. For an annual subscription of $600, Spell-Pundit offers the massive list, which is sorted by difficulty levels and guarantees that it includes all words used in the competitions. Business took off after last year’s champion, Karthik Nemmani gave a shout-out to the service.
Of this year’s top 50 spellers, 38 were customers, according to Dasari, 18. One selling point, the siblings say, is that their comprehensive database of words and modules saves time. The Dasaris estimate that their service, which allows users to type the words instead of spelling them aloud, makes preparation four times faster.
But on Friday, some wondered whether the service had taken some of the innocence out of the contest.
“If spelling is ever going to work again: ‘do something about SpellPundit’,” wrote Jacob Williamson, a coach and former National Spelling Bee finalist, on his blog. SpellPundit — plus other coaching services — has fundamentally changed the national contest, the co-champions and their parents said.
Harder words, some observers said, may now be necessary. On Friday, the Spelling Bee officials said they were considering their options. Paige Kimble, the executive director, said: “We are inspired by their achievement. Among other things, they are going to inspire us to find ways to better challenge them in competition. ” NYT NEWS SERVICE
2021: 11 Indian-Americans US Spelling Bee contest
June 30, 2021: The Times of India
Nine of the 11 finalists for this year’s US Spelling Bee contest are Indian-Americans, reflecting the dominance young kids from the ethnic community have had on this prestigious test for more than a decade now. The 11 spellers, of which nine are Indian-Americans, will compete for the champion title during the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee Finals on July 8. Over the past 20 years, Indian-Americans have been dominating the Spelling Bee contest even though they comprise only about 1%of the US population. There were eight co-champions in 2019, seven of whom were Indian-Americans, bringing the total number of Indian-origin champions since1999 to 26. PTI
B: CHESS
As in 2024
Sharmila Ganesan Ram, August 25, 2024: The Times of India
Bodhana Sivanandan, 9, will be youngest player to represent England in women’s Chess Olympiad in SeptThe queen was alive, the PM was desi and England was still raw from losing three one-dayers and two T20 matches to India in July 2022 when British chess veteran Malcolm Pein silenced a few teasing kids in Tamil Nadu saying: "One day, our Indians will be better than your Indians.”
While the cheerful Londoner was merely humouring the young players at the 44th Chess Olympiad who had reminded him how "India seemed to be beating England in both cricket and chess", his verbal checkmate has has started to resemble a prophecy since August 2023 when pictures from Number 10, Downing Street showed the UK's former PM smiling in the centre of the country's future GMs.
To the left of Rishi Sunak, stood an equally tall, lanky 14-year-old Bengaluru-born Woolwich-bred Indian named Shreyas Royal aka Shrez who not only went on to draw a game with 18-year-old Indian grandmaster D Gukesh in London in a few months but also fulfilled a longstanding personal dream last week by becoming the youngest British grandmaster at 15 years, six months and 24 days. Watch Sky News presenter lose to Britain's youngest chess grandmaster
Flanking Sunak on the right was Bodhana Sivanandan, the nine-year-old bindi-and-frock-pairing lover of princess TV shows from Greater London who now inspires dread among grown men and women every time she mounts a booster seat across from them.
"I've had a lot of players say to me they're terrified of playing her," exclaimed British chess veteran Jovanka Houska on TV recently about the Barbie doll owner from Harrow, who not only clean swept all 33 games across all three forms of chess in the World Chess Championship Under-8 girls category on a rainy afternoon last year, but also will soon accompany teammates between 23 and 44 years of age as the youngest-ever player to represent England in the Women's Chess Olympiad in Hungary in September this year.
"I don't look at who I am playing -- I just look at the board," she said to an interviewer recently.
Now, it may be too premature, if not immature, to ask Pein if he believes Shreyas and Bodhana are better than R Praggnanandhaa or his sister Vaishali but the two certainly are among a bevy of young Indian-origin chess prodigies born after the 2000s that have crossed the coveted FIDE rating of 2000s.
In a quiet post-Covid phenomenon that some observers chalk up to immigrant parenting zeal and other intangible factors, desi chess champions are rapidly soaring to the headlines in countries like the UK, US and Singapore at ages so young that some of them refer to teenaged Gukesh as 'Sir'.
Chess is the new Spelling Bee in the US?
At the height of Covid's second wave in June 2021, merely two years after he beat Praggnanandhaa's record by 17 days to become the youngest international master in chess history, New Jersey-based Abhimanyu Mishra sacrificed his knight for a pawn in Hungary to become the youngest international GM in the world at age 12, breaking a 19-year record held by Russia's Sergey Karjakin by three months and 25 days.
Closer home, Singapore-based 8-year-old Ashwath Kaushik -- who now advises newbies to "never give up, develop pieces and take advantage of the pieces your opponent blunders" -- defeated a seasoned Polish grandmaster named Jacek Stopa -- during the renowned Burgdorfer Stadthaus Open in Switzerland earlier this year. More recently, Chandigarh-born Siddharth Jagadeesh -- who drew a game against "Gukesh sir" at age eight -- became the youngest international GM of Singapore at age 17.
In the players list from US Chess Federation's National K-12 Grade Championships that had 2,449 players last year, names such as Advaith Karthik, Krishna Mutnuri, Kamalesh Kumar Sureshkumar and Ishaa Khosla are so easy to find that Daniel Lucas, senior director of strategic communication, is tempted to concede to our hypothesis. At least anecdotally, he says, chess may just be the new national Spelling Bee. The scene isn't very different in the UK.
"Go to any random children's chess tournament and look at the names. You'll understand," says Pein, director of English Chess Federation (ECF), hinting at the high number of South Asian participants in his homeland.
"South Asians tend to value academic and non-academic activities that promote concentration and discipline," says Pein, describing Bodhana's father Sivanandan Velayuthan -- an engineer who moved in 2007 from Tiruchirapalli to Harrow, a borough on the outskirts of London -- as "almost the perfect chess parent".
"Calm and dedicated," says Pein about Sivanandan whose rented flat did not boast a chess board until the world shut down in 2020.
Bodhana Sivanandan: British chess prodigy named best female player at European championship
While the compelling global allure of the OTT drama series 'Queen's Gambit' -- whose young troubled protagonist storms slickly into the male-dominated world of 64 squares -- coupled with the lockdown caused chess to return to mainstream consciousness with a vengeance post 2020, Bodhana's four-year-old tryst with the game was "a pure accident" says Sivanandan.
"One of our friends was moving back to India during Covid times, so he gave us a bag full of books and a magnetic wooden chess board," he tells TOI. "She was fascinated with the horse (knight) and the queen pieces and wanted to play with them as toys," says Sivanandan, who only knew the basics of chess then.
"I had to explain the game of chess to her using YouTube videos," he says.
Before long, the primary schoolgirl--who idolises the late Cuban legend Jose Raul Capablanca for his 'endgame'--put Harrow on the national map as UK's youngest women international master, walked down the grand staircase lined with past PM's portraits at 10, Downing Street on the invitation of then PM Rishi Sunak and found herself being compared to legendary Hungarian woman grandmaster Judit Polgar. Still, "she's just like other normal kids," promises Sivanandan, who has twin younger daughters, even as he prepares to hoist his eldest on a booster seat in Budapest at the Chess Olympiad.
What has favoured the rise of desi prodigies
Perhaps the recent rapid growth of chess infrastructure within India--whose GM strength has gone from 15 to 85 in just 20 years--has a lot to do with the success of its young diaspora.
"Millennial parents, who moved abroad in the 2000s, were well aware of the seriousness of travelling, playing abroad and coaching structures," says Amit Dalal, former co-secretary of Gujarat Chess Federation even as Jitendra Singh -- Shreyas's techie father who moved to the UK with his wife Anju Singh in 2012 and barely went on holidays to India after enrolling his son at his school chess club at age six -- points out that Indian GM Swayams Mishra apart from English GM John Emms shaped his son's GM journey.
Besides the internet and apps that have democratized knowledge of strategies that were once confined to Russian-language books, geography too has favoured the rise of desi prodigies, points out Mumbai-based chess coach Amit Panchal.
"To get a higher rating, between 1900 and 2100, you need to participate in a number of tournaments in Europe and other countries. For this, you need money and sponsorship. So, it's easier if you are based near these countries," says Panchal.
While Jitendra Singh would agree not only because he lives in the UK where the Sunak government pumped £1 million in chess funding, US-based Abhimanyu's father, Hemant Mishra aka 'bapu'--a techie who views the world through the lens of chess--has a different story to tell. "The ground reality is nobody cares," says Hemant, lamenting the lack of support of the US central and state governments, the US chess federation and corporate America.
It was to keep his toddler away from "Ipads and Iphones" that Hemant--who moved to New Jersey in the mid-2000s--turned the chess board into a black-and-white jungle in which the knight was a "horsie" who could neigh while jumping, the bishop was a camel and the rook was an elephant without the trunk. Sucked into the thicket of his bapu's stories at two-and-a-half years of age, Abhimanyu would start playing two years later till the leafless trees he passed on long drives took on the shape of an army-less chess king in his mind's eye.
During one of his earliest local tournaments, a six-foot-tall brawny man would look down at the puny five-year-old Abhimanyu and ask him to "go call his dad or whoever it was he was supposed to be playing with". After his bapu clarified that his kid was his opponent for the day, Abhimanyu fiercely avoided eye contact throughout the game, afraid that each good move would elicit a slap.
Months later, as a student of woman FIDE master Anuprita Patil at an academy run by grandmaster Magesh Panchanathan, he would spend the New Years' Eve of 2014 looking players his bapu's age in the eye at a tournament called 'Insanity', held inside a church. Soon, at nine years and two months, Abhimanyu became the youngest master in US history.
"I had beaten a 19-year-old world record. I should have been jumping with excitement, but my heart was so full that I ended up teary-eyed in the arms of my father," he writes in his biography about June 30, 2021, the day he became the youngest grandmaster in the world at 12 years 4 months and 25 days.
To ace the "cruel, logical game" of chess, this teenaged fanboy of World No 1 "Magnus, the mightiest" Carlsen, gave up drinking milk (as it made him want to throw up on long drives to tournament venues), dropped out of a US public school ("the system allows only five days a year off," says Hemant), joined an online school.
Last month, 15-year-old Abhimanyu was vying with the likes of Praggnanandhaa in Switzerland for the recently-concluded Biel even as the techie father-- who must follow the Eastern Time Zone wherever he goes--typed away furiously in a hotel room nearby.
"I cannot quit the job," says Hemant, who has borne all their chess-induced travelling and accommodation expenses for ten years--a budget that entailed martial art and soccer lessons to build stamina for long hours of sitting.
"There is something missing in the system here," says Hemant about chess in the US. "In Europe and in India, respect is given to the game.
Different countries, different support
Six years ago, for instance, when Shreyas Royal--who was six years old when he won the gold medal at his very first chess tournament -- was told that his family would would be sent back to India when his father's work visa expires in September 2018, both the national chess federation and local leaders came to the rescue.
Not long after he was ranked joint fourth in his age group at the World Cadets Chess Championships in Brazil in 2017, the young player found himself being told that the only way the family could stay would be for his father to renew his visa, a prospect that required Jitendra to earn £120,000 a year. The couple appealed to the Home Office on the grounds that their son was a national asset.
9 year old chess prodigy Shreyas Royal's story!
While that didn't work, Pein and Dominic Lawson, president of the English Chess Federation, lobbied on behalf of Shreyas even as Labour Party’s Rachel Reeves, a former junior chess champion, wrote to then Home Secretary Sajid Javid urging him to let the boy stay "in the only home he can remember”.
Within days, Shreyas "jumped on the couch" when his dad told him of an email from the Home Office informing that the family could stay on a new work visa.
"It was quite special to receive the good news on August the 10th and we got to celebrate it by visiting Mr Javid," recalls Jitendra, adding that the ECF had also helped his son financially on multiple occasions.
Three years later, Shreyas broke the UK record for the youngest ever grandmaster performance when he scored seven points from nine games in the €15,000 Bavarian Open at Tegernsee, Germany. Today, Britain's youngest GM receives support from an IT firm run by an Indian corporate giant that sponsors the “chess Wimbledon” at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands.
“Maybe me playing for England is a slight loss for India. But I feel India already has enough chess prodigies...,” Shreyas told an Indian newspaper recently before fulfilling his grand dream of becoming the youngest British GM.
"Whether it is a gain or a loss for India it is hard to say but Shreyas hopes that he’s made the answer to whether he’s an asset to UK chess blatantly obvious," says Jitendra about his son who plans on making it into the national team and winning the British Chess Championship next year besides hitting 2600 before 2026, in the only home he can remember.
Meanwhile, Abhimanyu's bapu continues to seek online crowdfunding for the world's youngest GM.
