Holothuriidae. Bonduc. Bembicid. Foeniculum. Shourav Dasari swivels his desk chair to face a computer monitor and begins scanning an enormous Excel spreadsheet, a cascading list of the spellings and roots of all 475,000 words in the dictionary. Eurygaean. Diapir. Ballonne. Carrageen. Shourav, a champion speller from The Woodlands, estimates that he knows 98 to 99 percent of the words in the English language. In Spelling the Dream—a new Netflix documentary that follows Shourav and other Indian American spellers through the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Bee—his friends and fans boast that he’s “the Michael Jordan of spelling.”
Spelling bees have long demanded an intense level of practice and study, and Texas’ sharpest kids are stepping up to compete. Last year, three of the eight co-champions at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the biggest spelling event of the year, hailed from Texas. This year, 11 regional champions from across the state qualified for the Scripps finals in Washington, D.C. They never had the chance to compete: Due to COVID-19, the bee was canceled for the first time since World War II.
After the Scripps competition was called off, Shourav, now 17 and retired from the spelling game, and his older sister Shobha, another former competitive speller, decided to host a virtual bee in its place. A score of students who had been planning to participate in the Scripps bee shifted gears to the virtual competition, which took place on Zoom and Facebook Live during the last week of May.
