Year without fun pays off with coveted award
Student skipped school trips, birthday parties to study his way to geography medal
WASHINGTON— Pranay Varada was stung by last year’s National Geographic Bee, when he flubbed the official language of Sierra Leone — it’s English; he answered French — and finished in sixth place. Determined to avoid another setback in his final year of eligibility, he started studying for this year’s bee that same day.
He spent a year forgoing school field trips and birthday parties to pore over spreadsheets he created with dossiers on every country in the world. That hard work paid off Wednesday as Pranay finished off the bee the way he’d envisioned: standing on stage with a medal around his neck, accepting congratulations and prizes including a $50,000 scholarship.
“It was extreme disappointment, to get all the way up here and not win,” said Pranay, a 14-year-old eighthgrader with a wispy black moustache. “I was researching and trying to find ways to not make the same mistakes twice.”
Pranay, who lives in Irving, Texas, survived a tense duel with another top-10 finisher from last year, 14year-old Thomas Wright of Milwaukee, Wis. Pranay had the best score through most of the two-hour competition, but Thomas pulled even when he gave a more thorough answer to an essay-type question about a country that would be well-suited for resettling residents of the Maldives displaced by rising sea levels.
During the championship rounds, both boys got all five questions correct, but only after Pranay successfully challenged an answer that was initially deemed wrong. The question was about a mountain range between northern Vietnam and Laos; Pranay identified it as the Annamite Range and not the Annam Mountains.
The bee moved into sudden death and Pranay won on the first tiebreaker question, correctly identifying the Kunlun Mountains as the range that separates the Taklimakan Desert from the Tibetan Plateau.
Pranay showed an interest in geography starting at age 3, when his mother, Vasuki Kodaganti, started teaching him world capitals and giving him puzzles of maps. When he was 4, his parents gave him an atlas that he would pore over every day. His mother said she didn’t know about the National Geographic Bee back then, and didn’t realize it would become an obsession.