By CASEY NEILL
ANIRUDH starts each day with a visit to the bathroom armed with biographies and flashcards.
The nine-year-old Keysborough kid is inspiring young spellers across the country to hit the books.
Anirudh, 9, trumped 3000 applicants to win The Great Australian Spelling Bee and his passion for words is also rubbing off on his younger brother.
Four-year-old Aarav recently finished third in his early learning centre spelling bee.
“I’m so glad that he’s been an inspiration not only in the family but to other kids as well,” their mum Sujatha said.
Anirudh spent three and a half weeks in Sydney filming for the Channel 10 program and took home a $50,000 education scholarship and $10,000 worth of goods for his school, Haileybury.
Camaraderie was the last word he correctly spelt.
“I’m really glad that I actually ended up on that word because it means a mutual trust or friendship that actually brings people together,” he said.
“That’s what I’ve been doing the whole time of the spelling bee.”
Anirudh started reading at age two.
“He wasn’t even talking,” Sujatha said.
“At his child care during reading time, he used to read instead of the teacher.”
She said he was a self-guided learner with a great memory.
“I really liked words in general and my interest in reading gradually developed into spelling,” Anirudh said.
“I worked on my spelling because it was my interest.”
His dad Prith told him he needed to learn two things to spell well.
“You need to learn words and then you need to learn about words,” he said.
“Mostly the origin helped me.
“If the word was pneumonia, so if the origin was Greek I knew there’d be a silent ‘p’ at the start and an ‘eu’.”
Biographies and science fiction novels fill his bookshelf, with a few biology books for good measure.
He’s completing an online neuroscience course run by Harvard University and has a neuroscience career in his sights.
“People say that the brain is the most complex organism in the whole universe that we know of,” Anirudh said.
“So my curiosity is driving that, and I also want to help people because there are neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease that devastate people’s lives.
“I just want to help them.”
Anirudh is the youngest in his class and skipped Grade 3.
“One of my skills is I can make friends really easily,” he said.
“They don’t really bother with how smart I am as long as I’m fun.”
Intrapac Projects chief operating officer Max Shifman said Anirudh was a “Somerfield celebrity”.
Put your skills to the test
Could you spell these words?
- Camaraderie
- Continuum
- Soliloquy
- Exorbitant
- Armament
- Metacarpus
- Mandible
- Cranium
