Slate has an interesting theory on the success of Indian kids in the Spelling Bees: a pipeline of talented spellers created by nationwide organizations like the North South Foundation.

The NSF circuit consists of 75 chapters run by close to 1,000 volunteers. The competitions, which began in 1993, function as a nerd Olympiad for Indian-Americans—there are separate divisions for math, science, vocab, geography, essay writing, and even public speaking—and a way to raise money for college scholarships for underprivileged students in India. There is little financial reward for winners (just a few thousand dollars in college scholarships) compared with the $40,000 winning purse handed out each year by Scripps.

The seeds for this current wave of domination by Indian kids was sown by Nupur Lala the 1999 winner who was featured in a documentary Spellbound. The Indian domination over the past decade and half can be chronicled in two parts: before and after Spellbound.

Just as Kavya Shivashankar has inspired the next wave of Indian spellers, Kavya found her bee mojo during the post-Spellbound boom. Before Spellbound, the 2002 documentary that featured Indian-American Nupur Lala’s run to the 1999 Scripps title, many first-generation South Asian parents saw NSF as a way for their children to assimilate—the best way to understand a culture, after all, is to learn its language. They used the North South Foundation events as a sort of SAT prep, teaching their children to use phonetics, etymology, and word roots to suss out answers.

After Spellbound, that changed a bit. After Balu Natarajan (winning word: milieu) became the first Indian-American to win Scripps back in 1985, he went on to a career in sports medicine. When Lala did it in 1999 with logorrhea, she became a movie star. (OK, a movie star and a neuroscientist.) Kavya has called Lala an inspiration—the license plate of Mirle’s teal minivan reads “SPL BND.” She’s far from alone. In 2002, NSF had less than 20 chapters pulling in about 500 mostly middle-school-age spellers. Then pop culture galvanized an expansion to elementary schoolers; today, six times as many students compete in North South Foundation spelling events.

Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 winner is a former NSF champion and legend of sorts in the NSF circuit.

Here’s another caveat to participating in the Spelling Bee:

You have to be more than a great speller to qualify for the National Bee—you also have to live in a school district with a sponsoring newspaper or community organization. These days, parents seem to be paying a lot more attention to such logistics. When Mirle Shivashankar realized in 2005 that there was just one Scripps sponsor in all of Kansas, he beat the bushes to ensure that more kids from the state—his daughter, for one—would have the chance to go to nationals. Kavya subsequently gained all of her berths to the nationals by virtue of a brand-new sponsor, the Olathe News.

The force seems to be strong with the Indian community in the US when it comes to education related events like the Spelling Bee thanks to an ever-growing pipeline of contestants produced by events like the NSF Bee. American football and basketball have a large contingent of players fed by pipelines in inner-city schools. The presence of such pipelines fosters competition and increases not only the quantity but also quality of the contestants. The National Spelling Bee appears to be fed by pipelines in places like Hindus temples, Indian cultural centers and drab school auditoriums.

The future for Indian-American contestants in the Spelling Bee is not only bright but also significantly younger. In fact, the future is all of 8 years old. [KC]

North South Foundation winners don’t have to worry about Kavya Shivashankar anymore—she has retired. At the Shawnee NSF contest this April, Swetha Jasti placed first, with a perfect score that qualified her for NSF nationals later this summer. But unfortunately for Jasti, she won’t make it to Scripps this year. When the National Spelling Bee starts up this week, their region will be represented by a surprise challenger: Kavya’s 8-year-old sister, Vanya, who drubbed Jasti in the National Spelling Bee’s Olathe qualifier.
For youngsters like Vanya, this is Scripps’ best selling point: Whereas the North South Foundation still divides contestants into junior and senior levels, the National Spelling Bee has no minimum age requirement. Vanya, who has taken to referring to herself and her sister as the Eli and Peyton Manning of spelling, will be the youngest competitor in Washington, D.C., this year. When ESPN recently showed up in Kansas to film a miniprofile for the contest, she grinned unabashedly. “Now it’s my turn,” she proclaimed to the room full of cameras. As with most things in the life of an NSF standout, the moment seemed well-rehearsed.

Wow! No pressure there, Vanya! By the way, Vanya did not make it to the semifinals this year but age is on her side and she appears upbeat about her chances in future years.

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Post tags: indian kids, spelling bee, success, vanya

According to the Hindu calendar, Sunday is the Akshaya Tritiya day, the first of the four most auspicious days to start new ventures, including entering into wedlock. Astrologer Premila Devi says Akshaya Tritiya is a day that “brings eternal good fortune”.

So, will Sunday see a meteoric rise in the number of startups and small businesses? Hardly.

Sunday will witness a huge rush for weddings in India as a six-month drought of dates considered auspicious comes to an end.
Professional wedding planners claim that around 50,000 weddings are taking place in Mumbai and half that in Delhi.

This mass superstitious hysteria will almost certainly make it an auspicious day for wedding related services – priests, caterers, wedding halls, wedding dancers, jewelers, planners, astrologers, tarot readers and retailers of palang tod paan. Auspicious or not, the denizens of these cities are in for a logistical nightmare. May is the hottest month in India and the temperatures are expected to soar up to 90F(an extremely humid 33C) in Mumbai and 102F(44C) in Delhi. More in Delhi, than in Mumbai, almost every wedding will have the customary baraat clogging up streets. If such stocks existed, Cramer would be, with much histrionics, insist you invest on “Indian wedding stocks”.

It would be interesting to know, if Indian-Americans also succumb to this mass hysteria. Do you know of anyone getting married on this day because of it’s “auspiciousness”? Do you live in India and are part of this mass hysteria or running into some crazy wedding related situation? We’d like to hear from you. Send us emails, comments, pictures or videos.

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India-Burma
2 April 1942–28 January 1945

“We got a hell of a beating,” Lt. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell told the crowd of reporters in the Indian capital of New Delhi. It was May 1942, and the American general, who had only recently arrived in the Far East to assume the position of chief of staff to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, was chafing at failure in his first command in the field. Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December, the Japanese had won victory after victory, extending their empire from Wake Island in the Pacific to Malaya and Singapore in Southeast Asia. When Stilwell had arrived in the embattled Chinese capital of Chungking in March, the Japanese were already driving into Burma, capturing the capital of Rangoon on 6 March. The American general took command of two Chinese divisions and, in cooperation with the British and Indians, tried to stem the Japanese onslaught. Defeated, he and his staff endured a rugged, 140-mile hike over jungle-covered mountains to India. By occupying Burma, the Japanese had not only gained access to vast resources of teak and rubber, but they had dosed the Burma Road, 700 miles of dirt highway that represented China’s last overland link with the outside world. The reopening of an overland route to China would be the major American goal, indeed obsession, in the theater throughout the campaign.

A colleague at work bought some currency from pre-colonial India. His Dad (an American Soldier-not related to the extract above) had been in India during the second world war, stationed as an aircraft spotter around the time when Japan was officially into Burma – which was also a British colony.

Here are some  pictures of what I saw today would like to share -

Uber Coin

Pre-colonial Indian currency (flip side of above pic)

Burmese Rupee in 1942, issued by the Japanese.

The language on the coins is fascinating, I can identify Hindi, Urdu and Telugu (apart from English) on the coins – the fourth is somewhat confusing for me, could be Gujarati or Punjabi. Some of the shapes, the four sided 1/2 anna and the wavy circle shaped 1 anna are very similar to 5 paisa and 10 paisa coins that I was used to in late 80’s. They soon lost any real monetary value and I haven’t seen them in a long long time. The donut shaped 1 pice is a unique shape though.Also growing up, the terms like charana (char-4 anna ~ 25 paisa), attana (aat-8 anna ~ 50 paisa) and barana (barah-12 anna ~75paisa) were quite common, when that amount of currency actually could get you something, like a bunch of fresh cilantro, or a couple of pani puris on the road side.

Almost all coins are either King George V or VI, a more detailed history of King George V and King George VI coins can be found here and here, for the numismatists among you.

And here is the Rupee, just after the amount of silver in the alloy used to make it was reduced (source: from links above)

One Rupee in 1944

© Sidhu for Über Desi, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Now, a study published today in the journal Pediatrics said young children who regularly ingest some imported Indian spices may be exposed to lead — a dangerous neurotoxin.
The study, conducted from 2006 to 2008, followed patients from the Pediatric Environmental Health Center at Children’s Hospital in Boston who had ingested or been exposed to Indian spices and powders.
One 12-month-old boy in the case study was found to have lead poisoning after regularly eating spices such as tumeric, black mustard seed and asafetida.

Turmeric, mustard seeds and asafetida are not the only culprits here. Indian women often use “sindoor” or “kumkum”. Whether it bestows their husbands with long lives is debatable. What is scientifically proven is the potential for lead poisoning for women.

But of greater concern to researchers are religious powders like cherry-colored “sindoor” — which is applied cosmetically on the skin and which Tilak also uses routinely in her home.
Some of these ritual powders comprise 47 to 64 percent lead, according to the study, and can be particularly dangerous when applied on young children.

Bringing these two to a confluence, are the haldi kumkum ceremonies celebrated in multitudes on Indian households across the U.S. If it turns out these products have that high levels of lead as advertised, these ceremonies ultimately could very well turn to be annual lead poisoning orgies.

Having said that, we have to point out that most of this is conjecture, and this study was conducted in the Boston area. It is unknown if the any of the products belonged to stores outside that area or even within that area, for that matter. By law, food and cosmetic products imported into the country have to be approved by the FDA. I can’t imagine the FDA approving products with this high of a lead content, or any lead for that matter. Draw your own conclusions.

Turmeric is practically an everyday product in most South Asian households. How does this news affect the way you view and use turmeric particularly for households with children? As for some of our female readers, if you use “sindoor” or related products, does this affect anything or will you continue using it? Or are you of the opinion, that such studies are “alarmist”?

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However, before any of the current crop had an opportunity to be stereotyped and marginalized, Noel De Souza, was busy personifying these terms.

In the early 1950s, India-born Noel De Souza studied theatre in California, where his schoolmates were Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, now Hollywood veterans. But Indians were so foreign to American viewers that De Souza had to play Latinos in Hollywood films for many years.

Before Kalpen Modi was born, Noel De Souza had played the token desi guy in screen gems like Jungle Jim (1955), Never So Few (1959), the TV show Mission: Impossible (1969) and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), Sanford and Son (1974) and The Man with the Power (1977). He also ended up playing a Latino in other screen gems like the TV series Zorro (1958). Of course, I use the term “screen gems” in a sarcastic manner but that should give an idea of how stereotyped and marginalized this actor was.

Noel De Souza attained the nirvana of stereotyping when he played the role of Gandhi. Star Trek: Voyager fans from the 90s probably noticed a Gandhi in one of the episodes. That Gandhi was played none other than Noel De Souza. [Video: Gandhi starting at 3:30 mark]

And yes, that is Gandhi with a skimpily clad woman. Where’s Zed uncle when you need him?

© Santosh for Über Desi, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aasif mandvi, hollywood, Kal Penn, noel de souza, south asian, TV, US