To almost no one’s surprise, the primetime Finals of this years Scripps National Spelling Bee will feature a lot of Indian Americans.
Of the 16 finalists — a record, up 15 from last year’s Bee — 11 are from the Indian American community. Normal statistical probability would suggest that there is about a 69 percent an Indian American speller walks away with the championship; however, even that seems low as given anything that we’ve seen from over the past decade, it is ill-advised to bet against the Indian American speller.
The following Indian Americans are in the primetime Finals: Aisha Randhawa, Anisha Rao, Tara Singh, Jashun Paluru, Navneeth Murali, Shruthika Padhy, Sravanth Malla, Naysa Modi, Rohan Raja, Karthik Nemmani, and Abhijay Kodali.
Of these 11, five finished in top 50 last year. Modi and Padhy finished 7th in the 2017 edition of the Bee; Singh finished 18th, Randhawa finished 35th; and Malla was tied for 41st place last year.
The 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee started this past Tuesday at 8 am with the preliminaries test. The Finals began earlier today at 10 am and concluded at 2 pm. The primetime Finals will begin tonight at 8:30 pm.