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A LOT OF people noticed that not only was Anurag Kashyap, winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year, of Indian ancestry but so were the first two runners-up. Children of Indian descent have won first place in five of the last seven years, and this year they made up 30 of the 273 contestants, a proportion many times larger than their 0.66% of the population.
I haven't yet heard anyone mention a "spelling gene," but it's probably only a matter of time. I have, though, heard people refer to Indians' interest in spelling competitions as a "craze." The origins of the craze hark back to 1985. In that year, Balu Natarajan became the first Indian American student to win. His accomplishment was received both by the Indian community here and in India in a way similar to the reaction of the Dominican Republic when Juan Marichal became a star pitcher. It could be done, and now everybody wanted to do it.
And Indian aspirants had some advantages, according to Madhulika Khandelwal, who runs the Asian American Center at Queens College. Their parents were generally well educated, often as scientists or engineers; they spoke English and knew what education could do for social advancement. They were "comfortable with the rote learning methods of their homeland, and they do not regard champion spellers as nerds," wrote Joseph Berger in the New York Times. That last fact could certainly give the Indian students a boost: the Scripps spelling bee was started in the first place to promote "general interest among pupils in a dull subject."
There are now some 60 chapters of a foundation that is designed generally to help Indians with English but that also sponsors many local bees. Indian chat rooms and blogs about spelling abound: if you Google "Indian spelling blogs," you'll garner 148,000 entries; Googling "Anurag Kashyap" yields 8,900.
Berger points out that, in their passionate pursuit of spelling championships, Indian parents are just being "as single-minded as other American parents, who have been known to help their fledgling gymnasts, tennis players, and singers." Maybe even more so on occasion. In the 1999 movie Spellbound, about the Scripps contest, one Indian entrant, Neil Kadakia, tells of a relative back home who has...