Hot Indian Spellers

Hot Spell:
Why Do Indians Excel in Bees?
Poring over a Random House dictionary in the middle of
the night.

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, June 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps
National Spelling Bee last week--the fifth time in
seven years in which a child from that ethnic group
has won this stirringly absurd contest--my first
reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking
pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of
the U.S. population.)

My second reaction was to suggest to my wife (just as
gobsmacked as I by this year's bee, in which winner,
runner-up and third place all had their origins in the
Indian subcontinent) that Indians must have vast space
in their brains for memorizing spellings, since very
little of their cerebral room is taken up by social
subtleties or a sense of humor.

My third reaction, since we'd just seen a charming
documentary called "Mad Hot Ballroom"--in which a team
of Dominican schoolkids from the Bronx had vanquished
all comers in a citywide ballroom-dancing
competition--was to say that, just as the Dominican
children in the movie had clearly "got rhythm," the
Indian kids at the bee had just as clearly "got
spelling."

Of course, any suggestion that any ethnic group has
"got" anything--other than a mother tongue and a
native cuisine--is open in this country to vociferous
attack. So I shall look for other explanations for why
young Anurag Kashyap, this year's winner,
was--yawn--yet another Indian kid who can spell
"appoggiatura" on television before a national
audience without breaking into a sweat.

As scientists will confirm, there are reasons why
empirically observable patterns occur: In the case of
the little Indian-American spelling champs, an
arguable one is that this ethnic group has pushier
parents than any other tribe, all very eager--no, make
that desperate--for their kids to succeed at school,
or at anything that looks remotely like school.

This attitude draws on a particular Indian cultural
trait, bequeathed to broader Indian society by the
Brahminical upper stratum: Success at letters is the
sweetest sort of success, the achievement nonpareil.

For millennia, India was a land where the poorest
scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest
businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous
for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's
first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured
fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for
profits) that his economic policies condemned his
people to two generations of stagnation.

But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian
pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization--the
result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods
imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in
which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to
pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for
their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a
moral virtue, and certainly as a caste "signifier," to
use a clumsy anthropological term.)

So the act of sitting down for months with dictionary
on lap, chanting aloud the spellings of abstruse words
and then committing them to memory probably taps into
an atavistic stream coursing through the veins of
Indian bee-children. A friend tells the story of how,
in his childhood, he'd had an Indian boy home for a
sleep-over. He awoke in the middle of the night to
find his guest poring over the host family's Random
House dictionary. "I own an Oxford dictionary," the
boy had said, by way of bizarre, nocturnal
explanation. "This American dictionary is so
different!"

If all that sounds too much like saying that there's a
"geek gene" at work here, let us consider another
explanation for the Indian spellers.

There are certain cultures--particularly Asian
ones--that produce child prodigies. Relentless
parents, goading their children to success at the
youngest possible age, are but one explanation. These
are all cultures in which, traditionally, children
have begun work early, in which childhood as we know
it in the West is an alien idea. Indian kids are
potty-trained by two. In America, that would be
regarded as precocious. Pressure is brought to bear
much later on purely American children than on those
kids whose parents persist in old-world child-rearing
ways long after they immigrate to America.

And here, perhaps, is the last piece in the
Indian-American spelling-bee jigsaw. Educationally,
Indian-Americans are the cream of the crop of a fifth
of humanity, thanks to U.S. immigration laws, which,
for decades, let in only doctors and engineers and
mathematicians. So these children are the kids of
parents who themselves competed--probably at a
ferocious level--to get into the best Indian schools,
and then to get here.

So there you have it, neatly explained. Master
Kashyap--singular fellow!--is a product of a complex
set of processes. Only a part of his success, I'm
pleased to report, is attributable to matters
deoxyribonucleic.

Mr. Varadarajan is features editor of The Wall Street
Journal.

http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006801