A 14-year old Indian-American student has secured the first position in the prestigious spell bee contest, Spell Pundit. It is a new spelling contest, drawing inspiration from the popular Scripps Spelling Bee competition.
Navneeth Murali, who studies in the 8th grade and is from Edison, New Jersey, sealed the winning deal by correctly spelling out “Karoshthi”, which is an ancient cursive script that has been in use in Central Asia.
But, the string of win doesn’t just stop there. Followed by the winning score, even the second position in the contest was secured by an Indian-American girl named Nidhi Achanta, an 8th grader followed by Harini Logan, a 6th grader, who secured the third position in the competition.
The famous Scripps Spelling Bee tournament, which is often dominated by the Indian-American kids across the time, has been cancelled because of the imposed lockdown owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is one of the rare times ever since the World War II that the competition has not been conducted.
Murali has been very persistent participator in the spelling bee competitions and even bagged the fifth place when he was in sixth grade followed by 11th place when he was in seventh grade. This year around though, he won the Spell Pundit competition and is going to take home a whopping price cheque of $3000.
“I knew all the words in the bee. I just didn’t want to be overconfident, because you never know what can happen in a spelling bee because no one knows the dictionary completely,” Murali said.
The Spell Pundit competition consisted of three phases, the writing, vocabulary followed by the oral test, which is what happens during the Scripps Spell Bee contest too.
Last year, following the competition running out of words to test out who could be regarded as the winner, the Spell Bee contest ended in an eight-way tie resulting in the octo-champions for the first time.
Out of the eight winners, six were Indian-Americans.
The popular competition, which is broadcasted on ESPN and gives $50,000 to the winner, is likely going to return the next year on June 01, 2021. The organisers of the Scripps National Spelling Bee cancelled the show suggesting that there is no clear path for rescheduling at this point.
