Udupi-origin sisters excel in US spelling bee

UDUPI: Jiya Shetty, 14, whose roots can be traced to the Amparu village in Kundapur, has won the fourth annual Columbia Missourian Regional Spelling Bee. Jiya, an eighth-grader from Smithton Middle School, won against her sister, Aanya,10, from Mary Paxton Keeley Elementary School. Aanya stood second.
Their father Pavan Shetty is a principal scientist working for a pharmaceutical company, and hails from Amparu, and Chaitra Shetty is an MBA graduate who hails from Bramhavar Padubettu Beedu.
“The sisters are also into martial arts, and have competed in national math competitions in elementary school. Jiya has won prizes in the science Olympiad. They both have won local chess tournaments too,” said B H Giridhar Shetty, a retired bank executive, who is an uncle of the sisters.
On the competition, Giridhar who lives in Katpady, said, “Students from 25 schools across mid-Missouri competed in the spelling bee competition held in the Reynolds Journalism Institute. After 94 words, 15 spellers and 20 rounds, Jiya won the event. Students from each school completed in an online test at the beginning of March. The 15 students with the highest scores competed in person at the bee. After each word was pronounced, the spellers could ask for a definition, the language of origin, part of speech, an alternate pronunciation, and a sentence featuring the word, he said
“Once all the other participants were eliminated, it was a fight among the sisters. Joskin, which means an awkward, unsophisticated and rustic person, was Jiya’s winning word. Interestingly, after the competition, Aanya said she was feeling good and bad at the exact same time. She said she was proud of her sister, and that she was confident of winning next year,” he said.
Both Aanya and Jiya studied unabridged dictionaries. Both of them got into the discipline, because of their love for reading. Jiya will now participate in the qualifying rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, to be held in June.