Thursday marked the fourth consecutive year that an Indian-American competitor won the Scripps National Spelling Bee (this year by 14-year-old Sukanya Roy). In a 2010 piece reprinted below, Ben Paynter examined an Indian-American organization that grants scholarships, raises money for the needy—and breeds dominant competitive spellers.

 

 

This April’s North South Foundation bee in Shawnee, Kan., might seem like an obscure place to find the spelling world’s two biggest stars. Mostly, it looked like the sort of geeky local bee I might have attended as a kid—except everyone there was Indian. Inside Shawnee’s Hindu Temple and Cultural Center, 23 awkward kids took turns passing a microphone back and forth in a hushed beige auditorium. No spotlights, no podium, just cringe-inducing feedback on the P.A. system. And for the record, the spelling was a-t-r-o-c-i-o-u-s. Just three of the first 10 contestants spelled their words correctly. At one point, a poor kid paced in circles and clutched his crotch before misspelling beleaguered and sprinting off to the restroom.

Amid it all, 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar pronounced words from a fold-out judging table as her father, Mirle, emceed in a sharp dark suit. Kavya, the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, is a spelling superstar complete with signature move: She air-writes each word across her palm before speaking it. Kavya and Mirle—her innovative, ever-enthusiastic coach—were at the small-time competition to pay homage. Over the past two decades, tournaments like this one—a regional qualifier for the North South Foundation‘s spelling league—have become a breeding ground for Scripps contenders. These minor-league competitions help kids as young as 6 years old work out the spelling kinks at an early age. The result has been an Indian-American dynasty at the National Spelling Bee.

 

Consider the facts: Indian-Americans make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population; this year, an estimated 30 NSF-ers will compete at Scripps, 11 percent of the 273-kid field. Recent winners include Sai R. Gunturi from Dallas, who nonchalantly reassembled pococurante for a national title in 2003. Sameer Mishra from West Lafayette, Ind., nailed guerdon in 2008. And four-time finalist Shivashankar made it back-to-back titles for North South Foundation competitors last year, air-writing Laodicean for the win. If Shivashankar hadn’t come through, it’s possible another North South graduate would have: Four other NSF kids cracked the top 10 behind her.

 

The NSF circuit consists of 75 chapters run by close to 1,000 volunteers. The competitions, which began in 1993, function as a nerd Olympiad for Indian-Americans—there are separate divisions for math, science, vocab, geography, essay writing, and even public speaking—and a way to raise money for college scholarships for underprivileged students in India. There is little financial reward for winners (just a few thousand dollars in college scholarships) compared with the $40,000 winning purse handed out each year by Scripps. Still, more than 3,000 kids participated in NSF’s spelling events this year due in part to what NSF founder Ratnam Chitturi calls a sort of Kavya Effect. “Most American kids look up to sports figures,” he says. “Indian kids are more interested in education, and they finally have a role model.”

 

Kavya Shivashankar

 

Just as Kavya Shivashankar has inspired the next wave of Indian spellers, Kavya found her bee mojo during the post-Spellbound boom. Before Spellbound, the 2002 documentary that featured Indian-American Nupur Lala‘s run to the 1999 Scripps title, many first-generation South Asian parents saw NSF as a way for their children to assimilate—the best way to understand a culture, after all, is to learn its language. They used the North South Foundation events as a sort of SAT prep, teaching their children to use phonetics, etymology, and word roots to suss out answers. “Our focus is not on competition,” says Chitturi. “Winning becomes an outcome of you focusing on learning. You are competing against yourself, not these other people.”

After Spellbound, that changed a bit. After Balu Natarajan (winning word: milieu) became the first Indian-American to win Scripps back in 1985, he went on to a career in sports medicine. When Lala did it in 1999 with logorrhea, she became a movie star. (OK, a movie star and a neuroscientist.) Kavya has called Lala an inspiration—the license plate of Mirle’s teal minivan reads “SPL BND.” She’s far from alone. In 2002, NSF had less than 20 chapters pulling in about 500 mostly middle-school-age spellers. Then pop culture galvanized an expansion to elementary schoolers; today, six times as many students compete in North South Foundation spelling events. “The parents were just excited,” Chitturi says. “They saw that it was a possibility [to win the National Spelling Bee].”

 

It’s no coincidence, then, that in the last decade North South Foundation has transformed from an SAT prep course into a training ground for Scripps. It wasn’t too long ago that NSF standouts like Kamran Riaz and 2000 champion Ashley Thakur didn’t compete at the National Spelling Bee. Riaz, for one, remembers NSF as a nice “alternative” to Scripps. Thakur’s thoughts on the National Spelling Bee: “Not to brag, but I don’t think it would be a hard cake to cut,” she once bragged to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 

It’s not quite right to say that Riaz and Thakur didn’t go to nationals because they didn’t think it was a big deal. The more significant reason is that they simply weren’t eligible. You have to be more than a great speller to qualify for the National Bee—you also have to live in a school district with a sponsoring newspaper or community organization. These days, parents seem to be paying a lot more attention to such logistics. When Mirle Shivashankar realized in 2005 that there was just one Scripps sponsor in all of Kansas, he beat the bushes to ensure that more kids from the state—his daughter, for one—would have the chance to go to nationals. Kavya subsequently gained all of her berths to the nationals by virtue of a brand-new sponsor, the Olathe News.

 

The North South Foundation could dominate Scripps even further, if more of its spellers were eligible to compete. In areas with more gifted NSFers than competition zones, the battle to get into Scripps can be intense. Whereas regional North South Foundation competitions are run like standardized tests—the best scores get weighted against a national average to determine the national finalists—Scripps operates more like a crazy single-elimination tournament. The winner in each local bracket funnels into a pool of finalists, who repeat the same process to pick a winner. That can lead to some powerhouse regional showdowns. In San Jose, Calif., for instance, eventual 2009 NSF senior co-champion Ramya Auroprem had to beat out 2009 NSF runner-up Sidarth Jayadev just to make it into last year’s National Spelling Bee finals.

 

North South Foundation winners don’t have to worry about Kavya Shivashankar anymore—she has retired. At the Shawnee NSF contest this April, Swetha Jasti placed first, with a perfect score that qualified her for NSF nationals later this summer. But unfortunately for Jasti, she won’t make it to Scripps this year. When the National Spelling Bee starts up this week, their region will be represented by a surprise challenger: Kavya’s 8-year-old sister, Vanya, who drubbed Jasti in the National Spelling Bee’s Olathe qualifier.

 

For youngsters like Vanya, this is Scripps’ best selling point: Whereas the North South Foundation still divides contestants into junior and senior levels, the National Spelling Bee has no minimum age requirement. Vanya, who has taken to referring to herself and her sister as the Eli and Peyton Manning of spelling, will be the youngest competitor in Washington, D.C., this year. When ESPN recently showed up in Kansas to film a miniprofile for the contest, she grinned unabashedly. “Now it’s my turn,” she proclaimed to the room full of cameras. As with most things in the life of an NSF standout, the moment seemed well-rehearsed.

via slate.com 

(Reuters) – Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic faced the U.N. war crimes tribunal on Friday as a defiant general who never lost a battle, denying the charges against him as “obnoxious” and “monstrous.”

Formally charged by a U.N. tribunal which has waited 16 years to see him in the dock, he began with a wary appeal from a “very sick man” but ended with a defiant flourish of his old bravado, predicting he would be acquitted.

“The whole world knows who I am. I am General Ratko Mladic,” he said at the end of his first appearance, a tense 100 minutes.

“I defended my people, my country … now I am defending myself,” he told the court and rapt public gallery. “I just have to say that I want to live to see myself a free man.”

Sitting in the same chair as political chiefs Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, co-accused in a conspiracy to carve a Great Serbia from the wreckage of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, Mladic began by greeting the court with a salute.

He said he was in poor health and needed more time to study the indictments against him. But by the end of the session, the general in this lifetime soldier had reasserted itself.

He told Judge Alphons Orie indignantly he did not want to hear “a single letter or word of that indictment” read out.

As expected, Mladic declined to enter a plea, and Orie set his next hearing for July 4.

“NO REMORSE”

Mladic shook his head in denial as Orie, reading a summary, described the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, of which his second-in-command, Radislav Krstic, was convicted of in April 2004.

“He showed no remorse, he mocked the court,” said Ramiza Gurdic whose two sons and husband were killed by Mladic forces.

“It took him only three days to kill thousands of our loved ones and now he says he needs two months to read the indictment,” she said, watching Mladic on Bosnia television.

Once an intimidating figure on the battlefield, Mladic now looks his 69 years. His mouth drooped slightly at one corner and his speech sounded slurred, the possible result of a stroke.

After making the hand signal for a “timeout” to his lawyer Aleksandar Aleksic, he obtained a 10-minute private session with microphones turned off, to discuss his health problems.

Afterwards he told the court he had been treated with “fairness and dignity” since his arrest, but had one request.

“I don’t want to be helped to walk as if I were some blind cripple. If I want help, I’ll ask for it,” he said.

Medical care of defendants is a primary issue for the tribunal, after the death in custody of Milosevic in 2006, in the fourth year of his trial. Karadzic was arrested in 2008 and has been on trial since October 2009.

Mladic is also charged with crimes against humanity for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995 in which 12,000

were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in a sustained campaign of “sniping and shelling to kill, maim, wound and terrorize.”

Dressed in a gray striped suit with a gray shirt and sober black checked tie, he frequently wiped his cheeks and mouth, stroked his chin and placed his hand on his forehead.

He listened intently to Orie, nodding or shaking a finger.

MOTHERS OF SREBRENICA

Arrested in a Serbian village, Mladic was extradited by Serbia on Tuesday to become the tribunal’s biggest case.

He had been branded “the butcher of the Balkans” in the late 1990s for his ruthless campaign to seize and “ethnically cleanse” territory for Serbs following the break-up of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation of six republics.

Serb nationalists believe Mladic is a hero soldier who simply defended the nation, doing no worse than Croat or Bosnian Muslim army commanders as the federation was torn apart in five years of war that claimed some 130,000 lives.

Ending years of anxious waiting to see him to brought to justice, relatives of the dead watched Mladic in court.

“I came here today to see if his eyes are still bloody,” said Munira Subasic, whose 18-year-old son and husband were both killed by Serb forces in Srebrenica.

“In 1995 I begged him to let my son go. He listened to me and promised to let him go. I trusted him at that moment. Sixteen years later, I am still searching for my son’s bones.”

The International Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, set up in 1993, expects to wind up its work by 2014. It has issued 161 indictments and has now accounted for all but one fugitive.

Serbs say the fact that two-thirds of them were Serbian is proof of the court’s bias. Hague prosecutors say it is a reflection of which side carried out the biggest war crimes.

For most of his years at large, Mladic managed to live discreetly and safely in Belgrade, relying on loyal supporters.

But as pressure mounted on Serbia to arrest him or watch its bid for European Union membership wither, his network of support dwindled, and at the end he was captured alone.

(Additional reporting by Ivana Sekularac at The Hague tribunal and Maja Zuvela in Sarajevo)

via reuters.com 

It is great that the U.S. government is revising the food pyramid — that diagram that has been with us for decades that’s supposed to remind people how to eat well. The model needed a revision, and the new version, called ChooseMyPlate, is a big improvement.

 However, there’s a different epidemic happening out there that’s getting less attention, perhaps because it is less obvious than the epidemic of obesity we’re experiencing. We’re entering an era of an epidemic of overwhelm. A time when too many people’s mental resources are being stretched through multitasking, fragmented attention and information overload.

 The trouble is, we are short on simple, clear information about good mental habits. Few people know about what it takes to have optimum mental health, or the implications of being out of balance. It is not taught in schools, or discussed in business. The issue just isn’t on the table. The result is that we mentally stretch ourselves in ways that may have even bigger implications than a poor diet.

 So, my friend and colleague Dr. Dan Siegel and I got together recently and decided to create what we’re calling the Healthy Mind Platter. This platter contains the seven essential daily mental activities necessary for optimum mental health in daily life. These seven activities make up the full set of ‘mental nutrients’ that your brain needs to function at it’s best. By engaging regularly in each of these servings, you enable your brain to coordinate and balance its activities, which strengthens your brain’s internal connections and your connections with other people.

The seven essential mental activities are:

Focus Time. When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, taking on challenges that make deep connections in the brain.

Play Time. When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully enjoying novel experiences, which helps make new connections in the brain.

Connecting Time. When we connect with other people, ideally in person, richly activating the brain’s social circuitry.

 Physical Time. When we move our bodies, aerobically if possible, which strengthens the brain in many ways.

Time In. When we quietly reflect internally, focusing on sensations, images, feelings and thoughts, helping to better integrate the brain.

Down Time. When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, which helps the brain recharge.

Sleep Time. When we give the brain the rest it needs to consolidate learning and recover from the experiences of the day.

We’re not suggesting a specific recipe for a healthy mind, as each individual is different, and our needs change over time too. The point is to become aware of the full spectrum of essential mental activities, and just like with essential nutrients, make sure that we are nudging the right ingredients into our mental diet, even just a little, every day. Just like you wouldn’t eat only pizza every day for days on end, we shouldn’t just live on focus time and little sleep. Mental wellness is all about giving your brain lots of opportunities to develop in different ways.

A fun use of this idea is to map out an average day and see what percentage of your time you spend in each area. Like a balanced diet, there are many combinations that can work well.

In short, it is important to eat well, and we applaud the new healthy eating plate. However as a society we are sorely lacking in good information about what it takes to have a healthy mind. We hope that the healthy mind platter creates an appetite for increasing awareness of what we put into our minds too.