National Geographic Geography Bee: Subcontinental Sweep

The performance just hosted by Alex Trebeck on the PBS network of the National Geographic's quiz-down on geography was almost startling. Six of the ten finalists were from Subcontinental India with Hindu surnames. The final five, after three white Caucasian girls and one Caucasian Iowa boy were eliminated, along with one of the immigrants from India, were all subcontinentals.

The eventual winner was a 12-year old named Bonny Jain, who had finished fourth last year in last year's national finals. Young Bonny had taken all three SAT tests and got a 2310 combined score, including 800 in math and 790 in another category! All through the match, he also appeared emotionally more focussed and centered than his older opponents.

The final five from subcontinental origins were actually head and shoulders and upper torso above the other finalists, and their overall prowess staggered even the unflappable Trebeck, who commented that next year they will have to get more questions, as the finalists almost ran through the whole list of brain-teasers.

Actually, I got the first three of the final showdown of the contest between Bonny and his runner-up, whose polysyllabic name I could not begin to remember. [subduction, forget 2nd answer, and Azerbaijan]. My poor daughter got picked up by her boyfriend before the end of the contest, although she had not done badly during the 15 minutes she watched.

Why can't we give an extremely high priority to the subcontinent, as their IQs and English skills give them extreme value across our economy in the frontal lobe sectors? And strange that there were no Jewish kids among the final ten, and a couple were from Catholic schools.