Column

This year’s National Spelling Bee in the US, that annual celebration of linguistic ratta-maar pointlessness, has, predictably, thrown up an Indian-American winner.

Since this is the gazillionth time in recent years that spellers of Indian stock have won this mindless competition, it has given rise to cultural-anthropological studies on whether Indian-origin kids in the US are genetically hardwired to become the Queen Bees of the spelling world. It has also become a platform for some wholly disproportionate and entirely misplaced Bharatiya pride about how, by spelling such obscure words as guerdon, prosopopoeia, écrasé and secernent, these nerdy kids have kept the tiranga fluttering in faraway lands.

All this is, of course, utter nonsense — or, to invoke the kind of abstruse polysyllabic words more frequently heard in spelling bee circles, absolutely amphigoric and stupendously stultiloquent.

Indian-origin kids in the US fare so well in spelling bees year after year because Indian parents are masters of the universe when it comes to being killjoys in their proxy pursuit of excellence in anything that’s even remotely seen as an academic endeavour.

Success in spelling bees, for instance, can come only by sacrificing the simple joys of childhood, such as watching television or socialising with peers, in favour of a rigorous and mind-numbing regime of spelling drills and tutorials.

An entire industry in the US revolves around converting young, impressionable kids full of life into unquestioning automatons devoted to the soulless pursuit of rectitude in spelling. There are even online chatrooms and blogs where Indians discuss spelling! And Indian parents think nothing of feeding their kids to this soul-killing industry in the belief that it will enhance their linguistic abilities when they take a shot at scholastic aptitude tests.

The other reason why Indians excel in this is that the very nature of the bee rewards the rote-learning methodology that Indians are at ease with. Rules about ‘I before E except after C’ — and the many further levels of complexities that grammar enforces in its whimsical way —are child’s play for Indian kids used both to the unquestioned acceptance of rules and to learning them by heart.

Spellings are important, but only up to the point where inexactitude does not impede communication. For children to spend the best years of their lives learning how to spell words that they’ll likely never hear in their lifetime seems a criminal waste of time and mindspace.

Far more creative would it be for youngsters to learn that the joy of language lies in using it inventively, in playing around with words and even coining new ones —in the free-spirited way that rap lyricists, for instance, do. It strikes me that the reason Indian kids can’t rap is that they’d rather be learning to spell obscure words in dictionaries than coining new words by bending, shortening, twisting and telescoping old ones.

Words make it into dictionaries only after they’ve been in popular use for a long time. A competition like the spelling bee, with its emphasis on spelling obscure words from those dictionaries, puts word-blinders on kids and enforces compliance to an existing order, rather than encouraging inventiveness by breaking free.

About the same time as the spelling bee in the US, I received an e-mail from a niece in India who’s just got her 10th standard exam results. Bhavani is a lively kid with an endearing, well-rounded personality, and, as a child growing up in the SMS generation, has a callous disregard for correctness in spelling, at least in informal communication.

“Thks a ton 4 the card,” she wrote. “I was a lil upset abt my marks initially, but I’m 5n now. Going 4 my piano classes... I’m really lukin 4ward 2 going 2 coll. I kno it’s gonna b hard work but I dun mind. K den. Buh bye.”

I guess Bhavani will never win a spelling bee. But I’m betting she’ll be a rap lyricist someday.
Email: venky@dnaindia.net