Nihar, at age 11, is the youngest victor of the bee on record.
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In the above video, you can see Nihar throwing up the “Dez Bryant X” after completing his final word and leaving fellow co-champion, Jairam, hanging a little bit.
This is for the ninth successive year that Indian- Americans won the prestigious Scripps Spelling Bee and 13th in the last 16 years.
The winning words were Feldenkrais – a physical education system – for Hathwar and gesellschaft – a type of social association – for Janga.
The two – who are both friends – each take home $40,000 in cash and other prizes.
“I’m just speechless; I can’t say anything”, he said. I mean, they already made changes to avoid co-champions for a third straight year, but clearly those didn’t work. When they both got their words right, the crowd burst into cheers. His brother Sriram won the 2014 spelling championship.
Of the 284 spellers that made it to Maryland, only 45 progressed through the initial test and two preliminary rounds of competition to take their spot on the main stage Thursday morning.
Jairam, of Painted Post, New York, misspelled two words.
Preparing for something as big as the Scripps National Spelling Bee requires young minds to know how to spell just about every word known to mankind.
The new rules call for the last three contestants to spell up to 25 words correctly.
The most-experienced Bee speller is Zander Reed, an eighth-grader from Ames, Iowa, who is in his fourth contest. However, he was pretty stylish during the competition and defined words to exude his knowledge along with the spelling. Paluru is 11, so he has two more years of eligibility to compete.
Nihar even gave the definitions for numerous words he spelled.
Nihar and Jairam’s parents are immigrants from south India, continuing a remarkable run of success for Indian-American spellers that began in 1999 with Nupur Lala’s victory, which was later featured in the documentary “Spellbound”.
Jairam plans to study medicine at Harvard, and Nihar wants to be a neurosurgeon.
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Cooper Komatsu of Los Angeles was clearly nervous when it came his time to spell.
