Ekansh Rastogi, speller 65, chose not to participate in last year’s spelling bee. The regional bee was in person, and it didn’t quite feel safe to attend, he said. So it makes this year’s success even sweeter, after his last appearance, in 2019.
The Florida eighth grader is in his last year of competition and said the fact that he’s a Finalist hasn’t sunk in yet.
“Any one of us could become champions,” he said. “I don’t want to stop spelling until I hear the bell.”
Ekansh likes to play cricket when he isn’t spelling and said he hopes to make the U.S. national team. He likes cooking, too.
And he described spelling as a way to learn about other people and cultures. The ways that words are similar between different languages can be telling, he said.
“It can teach you a lot about connections, a lot about history,” Ekansh said. “Seeing how a random word is spelled can teach you about evolution.”