My favorite resident Desi @ the WSJ – Tunku Varadarajan – felt compelled to explain to his colleagues & readers the improbable desi performance at the Spelling Bee –
When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week–the fifth time in seven years in which a child from that ethnic group has won this stirringly absurd contest–my first reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of the U.S. population.) …For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation. But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization–the result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a moral virtue, and certainly as a caste “signifier,” to use a clumsy anthropological term.) So the act of sitting down for months with dictionary on lap, chanting aloud the spellings of abstruse words and then committing them to memory probably taps into an atavistic stream coursing through the veins of Indian bee-children. A friend tells the story of how, in his childhood, he’d had an Indian boy home for a sleep-over. He awoke in the middle of the night to find his guest poring over the host family’s Random House dictionary. “I own an Oxford dictionary,” the boy had said, by way of bizarre, nocturnal explanation. “This American dictionary is so different!”
Heh, an interesting argument but, admittedly, only a partial explanation.
Nevertheless, I do whole-heartedly concur with Tunku that there’s a deeply inscribed Indian respect for purely mental and somewhat eccentric pursuits at the expense of more practical, physical ones. Many, many strands of desi philosophy & culture take a rather extreme position on the age-old Mind-Body problem. Long before Plato himself, Desi philosophers were advocating the basics of Platonic Forms and that it’s the physical which taints the mental ideal.
It’s pretty darn hard to envisage an activity more concerned with esoteric forms and less physical than a spelling bee.
Writing a blog 😉 You don’t even have to get up to grab the mike.
Maybe get a blister on your little finger, Maybe get a blister on your thumb…
Lordy lordy, I think I just strained my typing finger. Jeeves! Bring me some vapors…
For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits)
I am not sure what to make of this. Varadarajan certainly sounds like a Tambram name. I wonder where this attitude is coming from: 1) Tunku may be a self hating Tambram and wants to diss brahmins at every opportunity. Or could it be the following alternative? 2) This maybe a subversive attempt to make the argument that since brahmins considered scholarship the loftiest goal, they did not consider economics and wealth creation important. Since they did not value wealth as much as scholarship, they were lousy at wealth creation. The belief that non-Indians have been led to believe that brahmins have the greatest privileged life is thus wrong.
Instapundit covered this yesterday, and Madhu wrote in to correct him (far too politely 🙂
I’m not sure how relevant it is (i.e. how much this actually made its way into the contemporary desi mind), but it really was a fascinating practice. From what little I know of it, it involved repetition of lines of the vedas as they are, then with words (or segments of words transposed) and then again, etc.
So it would be something like:
and so forth.
So in repetition, if you get one sentence wrong, but the others are still correct, you’ll still know because they won’t match up. It’s a bit like how error checking works in computers.
Really fascinating…well if you’re a dork 🙂
I think that Tunku Varadarajan is making much too much of the academic and not athletic aspect of spelling bee competition. I think the spelling bee is a competition like many other competitions (sports, games) that one can excel in and eventually get a prize in. India-Americans have done well in spelling bees in the past and this encourages the parents and children to compete in this event.
People are naturally reticent about pursuing a competitive game or sport that no one of your ethnic group has ever excelled in. So Tiger Woods is now bringing African Americans to the sport of golf. Golfer Vijay Singh (a Fijian of Indian ancestory) may be doing the same, on a smaller scale, for Indian Americans. More than anything, Woods and Singh advertise the sport of golf to a wider audience.
So far, Indian Americans win the spelling bee by default. There just isn’t much interest in spelling bees outside the Indian American population, and if Indian Americans continue to win, it will stay that way.
I wrote about this here: Competitions and Ethnicity
Huh ? This has nothing to do with dissing Brahmins.
He is just dissin India’s historic socialist policies, which initially made a stand against imperialism, but ultimately ended up stagnating the economy for 40 years.
On another note, the author does make a common mistake by attributing socialist economics to the lionization of the scholar historically present in some Indian cultures. Nehru’s economic policies were influenced by marxism, particularly the seemingly successful Solviet Piatiletkas.
I don’t blame him though remember that economics is a very new science, and socialism must have seemed like a pretty viable alternative at the time.
Finally regarding the sucess of Americans of Indian origin at spelling bees, personally I think it must have something to do with having to remember how to spell complex names like ‘Varadarajan’ in a non-phonetic language like english.
B4 dissing Nehru, just remember u can question his methods but not his motives. If u look at the pre independence times and influences on all major leaders of that time – what they saw was the great depression and the success of USSR.
ofcourse u cant diss enuf his later insistance on the same failed policies and his even more deplorable scheming to perpetuate his dynasty… a tryst with dynasty indeed :-))
Nehru may have died but things havnt changed much. All the decision making roles are still filled by damn old world, confidence lacking, narrow minded folks.
Its abt time the dinosaurs got extinct and the younger generation has to take those roles…… Sorry for the rant 🙂
Vardarajan mentions the self-selection at play here – most of these kids are children of highly educated Indians coming from a system where rote learning was the lynchpin for success. American immigration only allowed for professionals in the 60’s and 70’s when they began allowing non-whites in. It will be interesting to watch outcomes now that there is a more mixed lot of Indians coming in. It is also no accident that the Indian diaspora in the UK have different priorities and outcomes. Ditto for those who emigrated – voluntarily and involuntarily – to the African continent.
They should have one of these spelling kids start teaching white kids how to spell. Charge a whole lot of money for such speed-learning courses (kinda what they do in India now with them tutors) and he’ll be a multimillionaire. Then he “patents” the speed spelling idea and sues some other kids who’re trying to steal his copyright. A legal battle ensues. Oh sheeyit, get offa the street its a spell-OFF! Through analysis of thousands of recorded spellfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any spell battle is a statistically predictable element. By the rote mastery of this art, your spelling efficiency will rise by no less than 120%. The difference of a 63% increase to lethal proficiency makes the master of the vowels an adversary not to be taken lightly.
how do you spell “geeks who get picked on in school”
First thing I noticed about Prof Varadarajan is that he was born and brought up in India before moving to London. In India, “memorization” is most often than not “rot-memorization” and I guess thats where his wording comes from too. I found it amusing to hear that word from a Lawyer. As for Nehru’s contempt to business men because he was Bramhin himself, a little more reading of the history might help everyone. Sure, there might be some pressure from parents of these kids, but…
Calling Nehru a prototypical brahmin is a huge mistake. If you want to see a very famous guy who is a typical brahmin in the modern era, you should look at Narayana Murthy, the boss of Infosys. Nehru was not a typical brahmin at all, whether he sported manicured fingertips or not. How many male brahmins in India do you know who get manicures anyway? He was a failure in academics, he ate meat (though occasionally), he wasn’t a teetotaler etc. It makes as much sense to call Nehru a typical brahmin as it does to call Michael Jackson a typical African American.
Varadarajan is ignorant about India’s intellectual traditions. “Rote memorisation” was necessary to preserve the original text in the absence of means to print and publish works of knowledge. Once a text was committed to memory the second stage of learning began with argument and debate and elaborations. In that way the Upanisads are a commentary on the Vedas and brahmasutrabhashay a commentary on the Upanisads and so on. “Rote memorisation” will not get you into any elite institution in India. Entrance tests demand a very well developed ability to understand, interpret and analyse problems and issues. This applies to the IIT-JEE or the GATE or the numerous medical entrance tests the CAT for B-Schools and of course the grandparent of them all the UPSC Civil Services Exam that one takes to enter the IAS, IFS and a host of other service cadres. Nehru a typical Brahmin? That’s funny. Nehru was anything but that. He was almost a extreme atheist, anti-traditional and kept clear of Godmen of all varieities. Nehru certainly would not have approved of a Spelling Bee. Although he did little for primary education the institutions he set up for research and higher education have all been about the unrestrained search for knowledge for its own sake. Yes these institutions can be faulted for several reasons but this is not the place for that. In fact in India quizzing and spelling bees won’t get you very far and count for little on your resume. It is a nerdy pastime at best. Hindu sacred literature advocates the pursuit of all the four purushartha(s) dharma, kama (pleasure), artha (wealth) and moksha (oneness with the supreme entity) and holds that a complete life requires all of them to be achieved. It is true that during the last 50 years Nehruvian thinking has shunned the accumulation of wealth to some extent. But this can’t be stretched into a ‘civilisational’ ideal without ignoring the 1000s of desis the world over who are unapologetic about the pursuit of health, wealth and happiness.
Another point that needs to be made is that rote-memorization was vital in a place where religious institutions were destroyed by foreign invaders. Since books were burnt and temples/stupas/universities were destroyed, the only way was to memorize the sacred texts.
Another thing: Spelling bees are not possible in Indian languages. You pronounce a word exactly as you write it. It would be stupid to have, for instance, a Hindi spelling bee.
I don’t think the same is true for Tamil though. I could never figure out which ‘na’ to use : ண, ன or ந. (They all sound the same to me). Or maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention in tamil class.
that’s okay, no one did.
What about the parental factor here? I think most Indian parents hold intellectual achievements in higher esteem than athletic ones. I have to wonder what sort of pressure is put on these kids by their parents?
Ahhh, I have been ‘outed’ 🙂
Abhi- politeness is a very real social currency, which of course the proprietors of this site know full well. Good ole’ SM.
Or rather, I have just ‘outed’ myself, which is no big deal to me; the main reason I try to keep a low profile on the internets is that I’d like my professional associations to come up first on any search of my name, instead of some silly blog posting. Of course, thanks to the Instapundit e-mails, that is no longer the case….
I forgot something. All these winners of the Spelling Bee that we are talking about are Americans – not Indians. While we are on the topic how about reading some real science on the subject rather than the half-baked we-know-what-want-to-say-so-let’s-look-for-evidence-that-supports-it that is often featured i the Journal.
Dr.Mano Singham’s long awaited book on the ‘achievement gap’ is available now
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1578862175/qid=1118721622/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-8679766-6996945?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Dr.Singham is originally from Sri Lanka and man of many interests. He has studied the issue long and hard for years and I can’t think of anyone else to help clear up the cobwebs in our thinking and let in a much needed graught of fresh air.
Good policy. I wish I’d thought of that when I first started blogging. Someone should write and make widely accessible some helpful tips and reminders for newbies.
This is kinda OT, but here it is anyway…
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/education/11898405.htm
(Use bugmenot.com to get in)
Area girl a budding Socrates
Not mentioned in the article – her dad, Atri Indiresan, was a top 10 rank holder in the JEE test for entry into the IITs and her grandfather, P.V. Indiresan, was once the director of IIT-Madras/Chennai.
OLIVIA WAS HERE <33