The first Indian kid to win the championship was Balu Natarajan in the year 1985. He did it by spelling the word milieu. He went on to become a Physician in Internal and Sports Medicine with a fellowship in Sports medicine. He practices in
The list of all Indian Spelling Bee Winners is below
1985 Balu Natarajan
1988 Rageshree Ramachandran
1999 Nupur Lala
2000 George Abraham Thampy
2002 Pratyush Buddiga
2003 Sai R. Gunturi
2005 Anurag Kashyap
2008 Sameer Mishra
2009 Kavya Shivashankar
2010 Anamika Veeramani
2011 Sukanya
For a full list visit http://www.spellingbee.com/champions-and-their-winning-words.
Time, effort and hardwork each of the winner put into the preparation for the contest has to be the primary cause of their success. Proper encouragement and supportive environment at home and in school plays a part. Assuming every winner had these conditions, a candidate preparing for such an intensive high
competitive event needs a training and practicing ground. To the Indian Kids this came in the form of North South Foundation(NSF). NSF has over 60+ chapters in
So far, we know that the Indian kids have been successful post 1999 thanks at some level to the intensive training grounds provided by NSF since 1993. What about the period prior to 1999? There were only two winners in the 80s and none prior to that. To that I would like to take one more detour and explore
the history of Immigration (legal) to US from
The immigration policy of US has been fairly restrictive prior to 1965. A policy change in 1965 could be termed a land mark for Immigrants from Non-Western countries to US. You can find details of the history of Indian immigration here. An excerpt from it that is relevant to the current topic is below. Italics are
mine.
The Immigration Act of 1965 liberalized immigration, increasing per country quota to 20,000 people irrespective of race, color or creed. The new legislation while ending the period of selective discriminatory immigration to the, encouraged a new wave of Indian immigrants who were educated and skilled and have profited from their knowledge. US
A further boost to the immigration from
After 1992, it was the relatively less noticeable route of temporary migration that started to become predominant. The 1990 Amendments, brought into effect in 1992, explicitly favored the building up of the human capital capabilities of America by fulfilling its current and future requirements of highly skilled knowledge workers, finally bringing to relevance the immigration of Indians to the American labour market needs.
The immigrant Indian population in US can be seen in the list and chart below. More details here.
Year Indian born Immigrants
1960 12,296
1970 51,000
1980 206,087
1990 450,406
2000 1,022,552
2008 1,622,522
So the immigration rules mattered. It limited the number of Indians coming to
In a follow-up to my first post on Spelling Bee, I attempted to find if there were a set of conditions that all communities, who attained success in certain specialized fields, have. The communities that succeeded, I observed, had
•Barrier Breaker
•Willing Takers/Followers
•Continuing Success
•Network for Practicing and Competing Opportunities
Apart from the above I had also wondered if the size of the community matters.
From what I can see so far, the success of Indian kids at the Spelling Bee meet all the above mentioned observations. The question to ask next is, with the change of times in India and USA, will Indian kids continue their success at the Spelling Bee and in the large context at the academic, professional levels. Also the success is largely achieved by the progeny of first generation immigrants from India. What happened to the kids from second and third generation? Why is their participation and success so limited at the spelling bee? The second generation is fairly successful. We are beginning to see a lot of the second Indians in the movies and TV, politics, leading corporations etc. The time has not elapsed enough and there is very limited data on the third generation. That’s a topic for another day.
