Inventure Students Shine at HDFC Interschool Spell Bee

What an amazing Sunday!! A big day for me. I woke up on that Sunday morning, nervous as I had barely studied but excited as this was my first Spelling Bee with people participating from all of India’s bigger cities in the major states.
Our team consisted of:-
Grade 6 - Aditya Parekh, Anishwar Sen and Anusha Ramji
Grade 7 - Alisha Kalyanpur, Kriti Varghese and Maya Sanaba
Grade 9 - Aditya Chandrasekhar, Krishi Bhutia and Prerana Prasad

The format of the competition was like this:
Each school had 9 participants from grade 6to grade 9. We had to reach the venue,the Delhi Public School, Bangalore South at 7:30 a.m. The registration took too long and we were able to start our first round at 9.00 a.m. Then, each contestant received a quiz paper entirely on spelling and grammar. The top ten particpants go for the next round, which was audio-visual. The person with the maximum points in the written and oral rounds would represent Bangalore at the National Spell Bee at Mumbai.

Within an hour all of us had to answer a hundred questions varying from fill-in-the-blanks to multiple choices. The written round was followed by a short break and we were treated to Horlicks Nutribar and Biscuits by the sponsors. There were 30 schools and 693 participants. We were told that we would get our participation certificates and that took almost an hour.The Inventure team sat with thier fingers crossed and they also cracked jokes that 9 out of the top 10 will be from Inventure.So, that is the Inventure Spirit:-)Jokes apart we all knew that it was very difficult since the number of particpants was huge.The Inventure parents and our teached supported and cheered for us all throughout the Bee.

Our fears were proved wrong as not only one, but three Inventure students got into the finals:


Anusha Ramji (grade 6)


Aditya Parekh (grade 6)



Kriti Varghese (grade 7)

And wow!We were the largest team from a single school at the TOP 10!Are'nt we elated!!!

An MC from Radio Mirchi came to hold the final rounds. The audio-visuals had 5-6 rounds.
Round 1:- In the first round each student got two words and had to spell them. Thirty seconds per word.
Round 2:- Each contestant was shown a slide and had to spell the answer according to the questions the MC gave us in forty seconds.
Round 3:- Rapid fire: - We were given words continuously. The more you spelt right within the forty seconds, the more points you got.
Round 4:- Each contestant was shown a slide with a poem and had to pick out the misspelt words within forty seconds.

The above were some of the main rounds we had. In the end we were sitting down in nail-biting suspense waiting for the results. Akila of 9th grade in Sri Kumarans School had secured twenty-two points! She was awarded a cash prize of twenty thousand rupees in a cheque from HDFC and she will be representing Bangalore in the finals in Mumbai.

What about Inventure?Anusha Ramji(Hey! that's me:-)) of Inventure Academy came third with 17 points. Then we were informed about our individual performances.Of course Akila of Sri Kumarans got rank 1 because she got 22 points in the audio-visuals and 100% in her test! Anusha Ramji (ME,ME,ME), secured rank 3 with 97% in the written round with 17 points in the Oral round. At rank 5 was Aditya Parekh,of course from Inventure grasped a total of 14 points in oral and 97% in his written round. Kriti Varghese of grade 7 (no prizes for guessing-an Inventurer) secured 9th rank with a whopping 98% (second only to Akila) and 10 points in oral round.

Overall all of us had a great time as this built up our confidence levels and gave us great exposure.
A special thanks to Meenakshi ma’am for supporting us and training us. I’d like to thank our parents and fellow school mates for cheering for us. Finally, I’d like to thank HDFC Spelling Bee and our school for giving us such a wonderful opportunity!

Anusha Ramji,
Grade 6A