South Asian youngsters continue to nerd their way to fame and fortune:
A 13-year-old girl has beaten 100,000 hopefuls to become the best young speller in the UK.
Gayathri Kumar, from Lancashire, correctly spelt words including troglodyte and disequilibrium to win the BBC’s Hard Spell competition.
Whom did Gayathri defeat? Wait for it…
The final, shown on BBC One on Sunday night, saw Gayathri go head-to-head with the other finalist, Nisha Thomas.
We have to do something about this brown-on-brown violence. I kid. So how did Gayathri best Nisha?
Gayathri, from Ormskirk, took the title when she correctly spelt Chihuahua and Nisha stumbled over dachshund.
Don’t dog Gayathri with accusations of arrogance:
Gayathri told BBC Breakfast on Monday: “I’m quite surprised that I won, I am really happy and elated.
“I didn’t expect to get this far, I thought I’d just make a careless mistake, and that would be it.”
When I was little, my father forced me to enter spelling bees all the time; when I lost the Scripps-Howard contest, he was livid. “You could’ve won the grand prize Encyclopedia Brittanica!”, he’d hiss at me, until I was 23. Perhaps if my spelling bee had cooler prizes, say…a trip to RIO (!), I might’ve been a bit more motivated…
Gayathri, a pupil at Merchant Taylor School for Girls, has won a holiday of her choice, £5,000 of media equipment for her school and the Hard Spell trophy.
The teenager says she was helped by her father Suresh Panikker to prepare for the competition and made sure she was not caught out by learning plant, food and medical terms.Gayathri kept a file of spellings which she carried with her at all times, for quick revision.
…She said: “I really wanted to win Hard Spell because I know it would make my dad really proud and I’d like to go on holiday somewhere like Russia or Brazil.
Oh Gayathri, not only is your Dad ridiculously proud (I’m sure he’s called three continents to brag about you), you’ve just saved yourself a lifetime of nagging. Trust me. Congrats, by the way. Go you.
