Japan throws its national muscle behind making vibrating toilets and Hello Kitty phones the size of a Tic-Tac. Venezuela and India dedicate themselves to making globally competitive beauty queens. Hodiernally, what do desi Americans do?

We make 12-year-olds in braces with salutatory spelling skills, says the NYT:

For many American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week’s national spelling bee were not appoggiatura and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers… All were of Indian ancestry. In recent years, descendants of Indian immigrants – less than 1 percent of the population – have dominated this contest, snatching first place in five of the past seven years, and making up more than 30 of the 273 contestants this year…

Crunching the numbers, desis are 16x overrepresented in the national spelling bee.

Excellence in a number of fields has always had a cultural tinge – consider the prevalence of Dominicans in baseball, Jews in violin playing, Kenyans in long-distance running. In 1985, when a 13-year-old son of Indian immigrants, Balu Natarajan, beat out his competitors by spelling “milieu,” it had an electrifying impact on his countrymen, much as Juan Marichal’s conquest of baseball had for Dominicans…

It’s not quite the same as Sabeer Bhatia’s adoring fans, but ok. I can personally confirm that desi parents dig rote drills for toddlers:

Indians are comfortable with the rote-learning methods of their homeland, the kind needed to master lists of obscure words that easily stump spell-checker programs. They do not regard champion spellers as nerds.

It’s not that Indian parents don’t see spellers as nerds. It’s that they don’t even know the meaning of the word. (Vinod is in the habit of saying, ‘Malayalees are the nerds of India. Of India!’) In a country with an insane level of competition for a vanishingly small number of good college slots and government jobs, being studious wasn’t an epithet, it was a necessity.

By 1993, the North South Foundation, based outside of Chicago and devoted to making sure Indians here do as well in English as in math, set up a parallel universe of spelling bees. Now 60 chapters around the country hold such contests, according to its founder, Ratnam Chitturi. They become a minor-league training ground for the major league 80-year-old Scripps National Spelling Bee… The enthusiasm has spread. There are now chat rooms and blogs where Indians discuss spelling.

The North South Foundation sounds like the Catholic Forensics League, a farm system for largely Jesuit speech and debaters. If only we could get Rebecca Romijn to protest us:

… her mother went to protest the National Spelling Bee. That is because her mother is a member of the organization, The Simplified Spelling Society, whose motto is: Werking for pland chanje in english spelling for the bennefit of lerners and uzers evrywair.

I confess more than a passing interest in bees because I was one of them: one of the chubby-cheeked dork army in huge plastic glasses whose parents spent weeks drilling them on the official Scripps Howard word lists. Je t’aime, bouillabaisse. You so crazy, wallydraigle. Come to me, caulescent, you paragon of prestidigitation. My prize possession at the time was an unabridged dictionary. My young parents spent weeks finding one that wouldn’t weigh as heavily on the wallet as on the desk. To this day I can’t see the Seattle Seahawks’ silver, blue and green without remembering the bee’s local sponsor, the San Jose Merc.

Twenty years ago on the way to the state competition, I was doing what all nerd-children do in the car, namely reading. The ride was so long, I got carsick and tossed my corn flakes. It was a terrible competitive omen. Being desi, my mom was in the habit of feeding us corn flakes in hot milk. Besides bedeviling Kellogg’s crispness researchers, they’re a terrible choice for a long drive. You’ve been fairly warned.

The bee took place in a rural part of Santa Rosa. I walked off my wobbly knees in searing sunlight, staring at pasture. The judges asked why I wasn’t inside; after hearing the stomach-turning details, they mysteriously lost interest in pressing the point. Inside, we sixth graders acted like they were asking us for nuclear launch codes. The more annoying kids would stall for time. Can I get a definition please? Can you use it in a sentence please? Can I get the etymology please? Can you repeat the word please? It was single elim sudden death, and there was no time limit. Some kids would stretch it into five awkward, silent minutes before whiffing, a melodramatic demise worthy of Wicked or Wagner. Those of us up next would wait under godawful pressure, sweating heavily into our Le Tigre polos.

Long story short: I snagged a minty-fresh blue ribbon and was a minor celebrity in Newark, CA for a day (slogan: even crappier than the original Newark!). I got a local interest photo in the twelve-page local tabloid, the Argus. And if you think about it when you’re high, isn’t being in the Argus just as good as being in the Times? Spelling bees gave me the social skills I have today.

Umm… right. On second thought, mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be spellers. It’s all being outsourced anyway to the squigly redz. One of my buddies spent his youth redesigning the background spellchecker in a popular word processor. Ironically, he was a speller par excellence. Good pushers don’t become dependent on the merchandise.

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Update: This one’s for Napoleon Dynamite fans:

One of the funniest moments of the National Spelling Bee yesterday… was when contestant Dominic Ranz Ebarle Errazo, before spelling his word, blurted out in his best Napoleon Dynamite voice: “Do the chickens have large talons?” The knowing kids in the audience laughed, but the adults were puzzled.

An easter egg on national TV! Listen here.