All southern Indian states can claim a piece of the title.
WASHINGTON, DC: Super spellers Gokul Venkatachalam and Vanya Shivashankar, co-champions of the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee, don’t just share a title: they both also happen to have South Indian connections.
South India consists of five states, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, and the region is home to more than a quarter of a billion people, or a fifth of India’s population. (Telangana was part of Andhra Pradesh until June last year.)
Interestingly, all the southern states can claim a piece of this year’s Spelling Bee trophy.
Venkatachalam’s dad, Krishna, is from Visakhapatnam, the largest city in Andhra Pradesh, while his mother, Sreepriya Vaidynathan, was born in Kerala.
Krishna Venkatachalam’s parents moved to Andhra Pradesh from Kerala, he told the American Bazaar moments after his son was crowned the 2015 Spelling Bee co-champion, along with Shivashankar.
The language spoken in the Venkatachalam-Vaidynathan household is Tamil, the language of Tamil Nadu. “My ancestors came from [Tamil Nadu] and settled in Kerala,” Vaidynathan said.
Shivashankar’s parents, Mirle and Sandhya Shivashankar, are from the Karnataka city of Mysore, formerly a kingdom and a princely state under the British Empire.
Olathe, Kansas, is the hometown of Vanya Shivashankar. Gokul Venkatachalam is a resident of Chesterfield, Missouri.