Youth beats ‘German curse’ to win spelling title

A handout image provided by Scripps National Spelling Bee yesterday shows Arvind Mahankali, 13, of Bayside Hills, New York, winning the competition in Oxon Hill, Maryland, USA. Mahankali spelled the word ‘knaidel’, a German-derived Yiddish word for a kind of dumpling, to win the competition.

AFP/Oxon Hill, Maryland

The US-born son of immigrants from India overcame his dread of German-derived words on Thursday to win the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Confetti rained on a suddenly speechless Arvind Mahankali, 13, from New York City, after he correctly spelled “knaidel”, a type of dumpling perhaps better known as a “matzah ball”.

He becomes the sixth youth of South Asian heritage to win the coveted title in the last six years, and also the first male champion since 2008.

Mahankali, the eldest son of an IT consultant father and a physician mother, had placed ninth in 2010, then third in 2011 and 2012. More often than not, it was obscure English words of Germanic origin that denied him victory.

“The German curse has turned into a German blessing,” he quipped after besting eight other finalists in a nail-biting finale to nationally televised competition that kicked off on Tuesday with 281 contestants from eight nations.

Earlier in the evening, Mahankali aced such words as “tokonoma” (an alcove in a Japanese living room), “kaumographer” (someone who prints a design onto cloth with a hot iron), and “galere” (a group of people who have something in common).

The forward-looking youngster plans to save the $30,000 cash prize – plus a $2,500 US savings bond – for college, where he hopes to get a doctorate degree in physics by the time he’s 23.

“I hope to make some kind of major contribution” after university, he said. “I’ll see how it looks.”

Second place went to Pranav Sivakumar, 13, from Illinois, while Sriram Hathwar, 13, from New York, came in third.

Amber Born, 14, from Massachusetts, a crowd-pleaser with her tension-breaking jokes, finished fourth.

The youngest finalist, Vanya Shivashankar, 11, from Kansas, the sister of 2009 champion Kavya Shivashankar, fell in the fifth round after a strong and engaging performance.

The National Spelling Bee has been an American institution for decades. This year, more than 11mn children took part in local qualifying competitions in the United States and abroad.

In a fresh twist, organisers announced – seven weeks before the championships at the Gaylord resort outside Washington – that contestants would for the first time be tested on vocabulary knowledge as well as spelling skills.

Doing so has reaffirmed the bee’s educational purpose, in a time when some hard-driving parents have been using custom-made software to turn their offspring into bee-winners through hours upon hours of rote memorisation.

Mahankali’s father Srinivas Mahankali, who came to the United States from Hyderabad in southern Indian in the 1990s, said the family encouraged his interest in competitive spelling, but did not pressure him to win.

“It’s an unpredictable thing. You can get any word in the dictionary. It’s unfair to expect anything in this,” he told AFP as his son fielded questions from reporters such as whether he’d ever eaten a knaidel. (He had not.)

Both father and son agreed that education is the reason why the children of immigrants have come to dominate spelling bees.

“They want to prove that they can learn the English language,” said the younger Mahankali, who is fluent in English and Telugu, the family’s native tongue, and picking up Spanish in school.

“At home, my dad used to chant Telugu poems from forwards to backwards and backwards to forwards,” added Mahankali senior. “We value language a lot ... wealth is fickle, but education is number one.”