Son of first Indian American spelling bee winner set for a shot at the finals
OXONHILL: An Indian American winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee is hardly a surprise these days. As usual, most of the favourites as the field is winnowed down to the 50 finalists this year are Indian American.
Among them is 12-year-old Atman Balakrishnan, who has tough shoes to fill — his own father was the first Indianamerican winner, back in 1985. Now a doctor in Illinois, Balu Natarajan recalls that he won by spelling “milieu”, hardly tough enough for today’s competition. Natarajan says spellers back then could win by memorizing about 10,000 words, but that won’t cut it today: “Now the kids who win have to know somewhere between 40-and-80,000 words.”
Atman, making his debut this year, hopes to equal his father’s achievement. No pressure, though. “He does help me and try to make me work harder, because he knows that I want this,” Atman said. “If he knew that I did not want this, he would not push me.”
Eighteen of the past 22 champions have been Indianamerican, including three years when there were co-champions. “It’s become now kind of a good cycle where certain Indian-americans succeed, and I think they’ve inspired others to do the same,” Natarajan said.
This year’s Spelling Bee has drawn the largest number of competitors in its history, 516 spellers, but the field got much smaller with the announcement of Thursday’s finalists.
The bee began with a written spelling and vocabulary test. It’s the biggest factor in determining the roughly 50 spellers who will advance to Thursday’s finals, and the consensus was that it was very difficult. The field of spellers expanded by more than 200 this year because Scripps started a wild-card program to give opportunities to more kids from highly competitive regions.