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Indian kids sweep US spelling bee competition
Anurag Kashyap from California beat 272 other spellers to win the 78th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Indian kids have swept the US’s national spelling bee competition this year. The topper and the two runners-up are all Indian American children, a dozen of whom were among the 51 to make it to the gruelling final rounds in Washington on Thursday.
Anurag Kashyap from California beat 272 other spellers to win the 78th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. For the 13-year-old from California, negotiating a minefield of words like sphygmomanometer, ornithorhynchous and exsiccosis was child’s play.
Overcoming the challenge from fellow finalists Samir Sudhir Patel and Aliya Robin Deri, Anurag won in the 19th round by correctly spelling the word appoggiatura (a kind of melodic note) and took home $28,000 in prizes.
Samir and Aliya tied for the second place, while another Indian contestant, Rajiv Tarigopula, finished fourth. The impish Samir, easily the toast of the audience at the Grand Hyatt, vowed to return next year to lift the trophy.
For Anurag, it was indeed a long haul from last year, when he had finished 47th. An avid reader and a straight-A student, he burst into tears as he crossed the final hurdle and ran into the waiting arms of his father, Chandra Roy. For his mother, the contest was so nerve-wracking that she retreated to the lobby to watch the tension unfold on a TV monitor.
Apart from appoggiatura , the words that Anurag tackled included: cabochon, priscilla, oligopsony, sphygmomanometer, prosciutto, rideau, pompier, terete, tristachyous, schefflera, ornithorhynchous, agio, agnolotti, peccavi, ceraunograph, exsiccosis and hodiernal.
“He is an amazing kid, who has studied more than 100,000 words,” said Anurag’s English teacher and coach Jim Dyer. “I didn’t think it’d really happen,“ said the eighth grader, who was sponsored by The San Diego Union-Tribune.
He was also a member of a study group, called “Speller Nation”, whose members quizzed each other online and in person in the days leading up to the Bee. “I couldn't do it without you guys,” he told his friends.
For both Samir and Aliya, it was an unexpected collapse in the closing stages after spelling much tougher words. Aliya was tripped up in the 18th round by the word trouvaille, meaning windfall. Soon thereafter, Samir fell to roscian, meaning skilled in acting.
