Akshay Rajagopal, a 11-year-old sixth-grader from Lincoln, Nebraska, took top honours at the 2008 National Geographic Bee held in Washington, DC on May 21, collecting a $25,000 college scholarship and a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society for his winning efforts.
The winning question was: The urban area of Cochabamba has been in the news in recent years due to protests over the privatisation of the municipal water supply and regional autonomy issues. Cochabamba is the third largest conurbation in what country?
Bolivia, Akshay responded in a flash, while members of the audience were still trying to figure out what a 'conurbation' is [a large, densely populated urban area].
With that answer, Akshay rounded off a brilliant performance, getting every single question right during the preliminary rounds on May 20, and repeating that feat during the final and championship rounds featuring the top 10 contestants, pitting their knowledge against each other, while Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek hosted for the 20th straight year.
His split second responses to questions -- name the westernmost Asian national capital (Ankara in Turkey); name the country where Makossa is a popular type of music (Cameroon); the location of Tillya Tepe (Afghanistan) -- had the enthusiastic audience rooting for him as the competition entered the crucial phase.
Host Trebek was moved to joke that the competition should be called 'the national annual humiliation', because it showed a bunch of middle school kids "have vastly more knowledge of geography than most of the nation."
Nearly five million students take part in the National Geographic Bee, open to students from fifth through eighth grades and aged 10 between 14 and 55 years; state and territory winners participated in the preliminary rounds, before the field was whittled down to the top ten. Nikhil Desai of California was among the ten finalists.
This, Akshay told rediff.com, was his first competition at the school, state and national level, and that he had been 'cramming up' for the contest for several months with world maps and text books and geography DVDs "I am very proud of myself," he declared, stating that he had felt very confident on the day of the finals because the previous day, he had breezed through every question without faltering "and of course, also because of the fact that I had studied a lot and so I was so ready."
His hobbies include playing chess, collecting coins, video games and roller-skating; he plays the clarinet for the school band, and ranks as his hero former Vice President, Nobel Laureate and Oscar winner Al Gore, because of the awareness he has raised about global warming.
Akshay, who lived in Malaysia for a few years when his father was posted there, named Langkawi Island, a few hours from Penang, as his favorite tourist destination, but added that his dream was to go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.
"I would like to do meteorology or map-making," he said when asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, but added that he had not thought of any college in particular to pursue the career of his choice. "What I am going to do [with the $25,000 scholarship money] is that I am going to put it in an interest account and make it grow."
Akshay's father, Vijay Rajagopal, a plastics engineer with the Lincoln-headquartered Laird Technologies, and mother Suchitra Srinivas, a homemaker, were on hand at the auditorium to cheer him on, and after his victory took him around town and later to New York for a series of television interviews. The competition was aired live on the National Geographic channel, and in the coming weeks is also scheduled to air on PBS channels across the country.
Bangalore-born Vijay Rajagopal, who migrated to the US in 1988 for graduate studies, said he was "so proud of Akshay's performance, because this was his debut at the school, state and national level and he put up a dazzling show, if I say so myself."
He said his son's yen for geography had begun while he was on assignment for Laird -- then Centurian -- in Penang "and I had gotten him a kid's atlas when he was about five years of age. He was looking at capitals of US states, and we realised he could remember them very quickly and in alphabetical order, I may add."
"And so we challenged him to learn the names of different continents and countries around the world, and found he could remember them all without any problem. Then he tried his luck with currencies and flags, and along the way he got very interested with things like that, and he would just spend a lot of time just looking at maps, and he could rattle off the names of continents, countries, cities, rivers and everything else which continued to amaze us no end."
The second place winner, who earned a $15,000 college scholarship, was Alabama's Hunter Bledsoe, 13, an eighth-grader at Hewitt Trussville Middle School in Trussville. William Lee of Massachusetts, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Joyce Middle School on Woburn, north of Boston, took third spot and with it a $10,000 college scholarship.
Image: Akshay Rajagopal after winning the 2008 National Geographic Bee.
