The last word Bruhat Soma spelled was abseil. It means descending a rock by rappelling down with ropes.
The Florida native was spot on: “A-B-S-E-I-L,” he swiftly blurted before the buzzer went off at this week’s National Spelling Bee. The 12-year-old Soma had correctly spelled 29 out of 30 words within 90 seconds, beating his final opponent, Faizan Zaki of Texas, who spelled 20.
“Well, I’m really excited,” Soma said shortly after being named the winner. “It’s been my goal for this past year to win, and I’ve been working really hard, so I just put a lot of time into spelling, and then now I’m really happy that I won. Like, I really can’t describe it. I’m still shaking.”
He will receive $50,000 as the prize, as well as a medal and a trophy. Counting Soma’s victory, 29 out of the last 35 champions have been Indian American. This includes seven of the eight co-winners in 2019.
Balu Natarajan paved the way by becoming the first South Asian to win this competition in 1985. The Associated Press at the time reported the “immigrants’ son” spoke his “parents’ native Indian language at home.”
Natarajan made history then but his story is all too common now with the never-ending winning streak of South Asian American kids. Under the surface, this trend is evidence of the pattern of Indian immigration to the U.S. since 1965, as Shalini Shankar, an anthropology and Asian American studies professor at Northwestern University, told New York Magazine. After the Immigration Act of 1990, many of these immigrants were highly educated workers, overwhelmingly trained in STEM fields.
“So you have this concentration of STEM professionals who value education even more intensely than the earlier waves of immigrants had. And they’ve built up this infrastructure for their kids, including this whole minor-league spelling circuit just for South Asian kids,” she said. The North South Foundation is an organization that stages spelling bees in the U.S. for Indian American children.
“(The Indian community) has invested so much time and energy in this process, and the result is this winning streak we see now.” Over 60% of Indian immigrants living in the U.S. today arrived after 2000. Indian Americans make up 1.35% of the population and are the highest-earning ethnic group in the U.S. According to the 2022 census, the average Indian American household earned $123,700.
Another contributing reason for success can be traced back to the cultural heritage of India that has been using mnemonic devices to orally transmit religious scriptures, like hymns, chants and epic poems, over centuries, as Gurnek Bains, the founder and CEO of Global Future that seeks to build bridges between cultures and the author of “Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization,” wrote in 2015.
Shankar, in her book “Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal about Generation Z’s New Path to Success,” touches on the parenting styles of Asian parents, like the “Tiger Mother” archetype that demands perfection and imposes strict discipline. A stark difference from the laid-back approach of white middle-class families, as she wrote in an opinion article for CNN in 2019.
In her six years of research for the book, Shankar found that South Asian parents perceive childhood as not only a time for play but also to build a foundation for education and skills. This, they hope, will prepare a child for the adult world.
Indian parents are often laser-focused on academic accomplishments and willing to chip in for their child’s success as much as possible. The latest champion, Soma, worked on spellings with his father, Srinivas Soma, every day for six months. “My dad would prepare a list of 30 words. I would try to answer as many as I could in 90 seconds. I knew I had a chance at it,” the winner told the Tampa Bay Times.
Natarajan, the first Indian American champion, now a practicing doctor specializing in sports medicine, has also tried explaining why South Asian kids are so good at this competition.
“In any field, in order to do well, you have to have opportunity, skills and you have to have a good strategy. You have to have the talent and you have to execute. But before that, you have to have interest,” the former champion said in an interview a few years ago. He is now the president of the North South Foundation.
Soma has also said he wants to be a doctor when he grows up and understands there are no shortcuts to success, whether it’s a spelling bee or anything else.
“First, make a goal. Then realize how hard you have to work,” he said. “Then work for it, and you’ve got it.” Even though he lost in the quarterfinals last year, he didn’t let his disappointment get the best of him.