Ahmedabad’s spelling bee master ready to go places

He can spell his way through some of the toughest words. For 12-year-old Advait Shroff, a student of Udgam School, spelling some of the most difficult words is child's play.

So it comes as no surprise that he bagged the state championship award in the Marrs Spelling Bee contest.

That is not all. Shroff will be taking part in the international round of the competition to be held in Kolkata on October 8. But the young champion has a busy week and month ahead of the competition, leaving him no time to prepare.   
But the confident boy said: "Although I have the international round on October 8, I have not started preparing for it as my mid-term exams are approaching. Also, I will be hosting a prestigious show at AMA on September 16, the last day of my mid-term exam. So technically, I have only 14 days to prepare for the international round. But time will not deter my preparations."

Talking about Advait's achievement, his mother, Manjula Shroff says: 

"Advait has always been a voracious reader and therefore, every time he participated in the viva rounds of spelling contests in school, the hosts would run out of spellings for him," she says and adds, "He had less than 40 hours to prepare for the inter-school competition. Besides, he also had viva, written tests and jumble words as competitions besides a word application and pronunciation key round. With every competition, the rounds would increase."

Manjula added that for the state level championship, more rounds such as five written rounds and crossword were added, in addition to the aforesaid rounds.

Shroff bagged the first place while competing with students from Udgam, Zydus, HB Kapadia, Cosmos, DAV, DLA, Asia English School, LML, St Kabir, St Xavier's and Anand Niketan. The young champion has already cleared the national written rounds, wherein idioms were included as one of the competitions and he had to compete with students from 22 states.

For the international round, Shroff, besides preparing for dictation,
has to also get ready for six rounds — synonym, antonym, phrasal words, idioms, crosswords, sentence formation and jumbled words.

According to Preeti Aiyar, who conducted the first batch of the competition this year, "I used to co-ordinate for Marrs in Mumbai and was later posted in Ahmedabad as Head of Marrs in Gujarat.
The state has tremendous scope for improvement and with such competitions, children will get an opportunity to grow and learn more of the language in a far better manner."