Devils Advocate: What is this fascination Indians have with Spelling Bees?-Opinion News , Firstpost

Is the ability to remember words or interpret their spelling from phonetic sounds, really a talent? Sure memory has its applications, but rewarding just how great it is compared to machines and diaries is practically ludicrous.

About a day ago a small video snippet began circulating on social media and WhatsApp where a young Indian girl powers through 90 seconds, effortlessly spelling words nobody has heard of in their lives. People remarked that the tie-breaker was ‘intense’ and the feat, as robotic as it seemed to eye, ‘incredible’. Firstly, the pleasure of watching kids spell words nobody is ever really going to use or maybe even need, unless they are at the bee itself has eluded me for years. Indian diaspora kids have made the spelling bee their own in what is an odd attempt at building a franchise around talent. But really is it talent if a kid can guess or vaguely derive the spelling of a word from its phonetics? What other bizarre, rote skills do Indian kids possess that can be celebrated? No I’m really asking.

Indians will celebrate pretty much anything, from moustaches pulling tractors to nails that can probably reach out into space and scratch Jeff Bezos’ back while he is in his phallus-shaped rocket. We pursue absurd accomplishments and recognise arbitrary, freaky, non-applicable skills as some sort of inherent skill. Sure, having a good memory is great, but its worthless if you do not possess the intellectual craft to shape and critique information. This modern frenzy around a spelling contest reminded me of a roommate from my early days in professional life. This guy could tell the 16-digit number of everyone’s debit card by heart. It was amusingly impressive, this ability to remember because the rest of us couldn’t even if we cared enough to. Surprisingly, this unquantified but eccentric talent didn’t translate to great work at the office where we worked together.

The perceptive value of skill and talent can be subjective. An influencer who comes across as a dizzying dud to some, is an influencer because people follow and resonate with whatever shtick they produce. But the contextual freedom of talent evaporates when it comes to the young and impressionable. Because they scar easier. I don’t really understand what is impressive about being able to remember the dictionary, sequential events in history or the capitals of the world and so on. Humans are command intelligence through intellect, not their ability to remember rules but to apply them in the moment. Also, impressionable kids tend to assign self-worth to things that aren’t even relevant to real-life or command any real meaning. I can imagine, a lot of Indian parents are setting their children up for high school bullying by motivating or forcing them to compete in abstract competitions that not a lot of other cultures see value in. It’s like saying my kid is great at being tall, counting stars or tying knots. Someone has probably tried that last one.

I’m not dismissing the idea of good memory as being a valuable tool, just that it needs to applied to things vastly more complex than the learning of words that sound funny, and have probably no use other than in medical journals or Shashi Tharoor’s letters to himself. Language is supposed to aspire to universality, and the fact that it most often struggles to is one of its major flaws. To which effect, fawning at someone’s ability to not forget things that you don’t even need to remember is a cynically manipulative way of creating competition where none exists. It’s like wanting to celebrate someone’s ability to hold in his farts the longest, poke their own eyes or squeal at an ungodly pitch. None of these are conceivable challenges that a sport or competition can be built around. The motor-like recall of words and their spellings, quite similarly, is a pointless exercise in trying to outdo a computer, quite incredibly at the least impressive things a computer does – hold information. To their credit, I’m sure these kids who line up at spelling bees are smart enough to actually contemplate and confront actual problems. Remembering the spelling of a word that nobody has heard of is never going to be on anyone’s speed dial or have an app for it. And god knows, we are building one for pretty much everything.

Spelling bees are ironically reflective of the Indian education system that champions rote learning and uninspired memorisation of the outdated and obscure over curiosity and critique. It’s why despite having a rich history, it’s the most boring subject in school. It’s why literature despite its variety and depth, feels obscure and oddly condescending. It’s also why students gravitate towards the sophistication of the sciences, because they alone seem capable of inspiring intrigue, by simply at times, being flawed. Get to college, and things are even worse. We learn or rather memorize things we don’t need to and dive into subjects that fill gaps in the roster rather than curiosity in the human brain. Application therefore requires a massive amount of unlearning. To which effect, even the ability to coherently string together a sentence, would require you to defy the thesaurus as a literary overlord. Simplicity triumphs where skill cannot. Which is why it’s obscene to push kids to perfect skills that make them comparable to machines rather than rational humans. These kids might be winning bees but they are closer to memorising internet ‘captcha’ codes than knowing the socio-political referendums that made security, on the web, inevitable. It’s like watching circus freaks do inanely wondrous things that mean nothing outside the ring. But at least we are winning at it, right?

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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