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. Continue reading
