Indian dominance of spelling bee is spellbinding

That an Indian-American has won the final of this year’s spelling bee in the US is about as surprising as the annual revelation that girls have “outshone” boys in the annual board examinations in India. It would be astonishing if these did not happen. Even the fact that eight of the 11 finalists of this year’s popular school-level contest were of Indian origin is a ho-hum revelation. Had the Chinese suddenly bested us in this sphere, for instance, there may have been cause for concern. But the only noteworthy deviation this time was the all-(Indian)-boy final, breaking the four-year winning streak of Indian-origin girls. Anything less than an ethnic monopoly would first spark consternation in nonresident Indian circles where dynamic random access memory — developed in closely-integrated (family) circuits for generations — are a matter of deep pride.

If tender Indian brains with hard disks of geopbyte capacities do not spew out the requisite spellings of arcane words, there will be probes and soul-searching. But till that nightmare happens, legions of Indian immigrant progeny — many of them siblings of previous Big Bees, going by current trends — can continue memorising vast compendiums of recondite etyma to bee the best in 2014. But what do they scrabble after, after this spell is over, one wonders.