Indian-American Aravind Mahankali held his nerve on the final word, 'knaidel,' to win the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee
My ancestral homeland has rarely produced the world's greatest athletes: it took India, the second largest nation on earth, 108 years to win its first individual Olympic gold medal (in 2008, in the 10-m air-rifle event), and although 108 was a highly auspicious number for that champion Indian mental athlete, Gautama Buddha, it's still a long time to wait. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, my motherland of 1 billion citizens came away with a single bronze, leaving it tied with the likes of Barbados (pop. 270,000) and Kuwait, in 71st place. Tiny Cuba, with a population smaller than...
