Rancho Cucamonga, California — 14-year-old Shrey Parikh has won the 98th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, defeating 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta in a lightning-round tiebreaker to become the 111th champion in the competition's history.
The Championship Spell-Off
Parikh and Gupta were the final two spellers standing after a tense competition that culminated in a 90-second "spell-off" on Thursday night. In the tiebreaker, each speller raced to spell as many words as possible:
Parikh's dominant performance turned what began as a high-quality final into a conclusive victory, earning him the title of best young speller in the English language.
Champion's Profile
Runner-Up: Ishaan Gupta
Prize Package
Parikh's victory comes with substantial rewards:
$52,500 cash prize
Reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster
Custom trophy and commemorative medal
$1,000 in Delta Air Lines flight credits
A Remarkable Spelling Journey
This victory marks a significant comeback for Parikh, who was the runner-up just two years ago in 2024, finishing behind Faizan Zaki. Zaki went on to win the 2025 Bee, making this year's final particularly meaningful as Parikh returned to claim the championship.
Competition Details
The 2026 Bee featured 247 spellers representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, three U.S. territories, and five countries: the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates. After preliminary rounds, 167 spellers advanced, with 95 reaching the quarterfinals following the written spelling and vocabulary test.
Eight finalists ultimately reached Thursday's finals, with competitors advancing through regional bees hosted by sponsors nationwide. To compete, spellers must not have advanced beyond eighth grade or be older than 15.spellingbee+1
Historical Context
Although this was the 98th Scripps National Spelling Bee, Parikh is officially the 111th champion due to multiple ties in the competition's history, including an eight-way tie in 2019. The Bee was first held in 1925 and has been canceled only twice: during World War II (1943–1945) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020). This year marked the competition's return to Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House.
Beloved author Ruskin Bond marked his 92nd birthday in the hills of Dehradun, surrounded by eager young readers, chirping birds, and the launch of his latest collection, *All-Time Favourite Friendship Stories*. Held a day before his official birthday, the event drew about 100 children from nearby schools and their teachers, turning a simple book launch into a warm, multigenerational celebration of the man and his work.
The new book gathers 25 of Bond’s most cherished stories on friendship, spanning his long career and highlighting the quiet magic of companionship in all its forms: from unexpected bonds between children and animals to deep, lasting friendships between people who find each other almost by accident. Penguin Random House India’s Children’s Division, including publisher Sohini Mitra and Puffin’s Kavya Wahi, helped organise the launch, underscoring a publishing relationship that now stretches across two generations of readers.
For decades, Bond’s birthday in Dehradun has been marked by the release of a fresh title, making it one of the gentlest traditions in Indian publishing. What began as an annual release has evolved into a small cultural rite: children who once read his stories with their parents now attend with their own children, some of them participating in quizzes and readings during the festivities.
Surrounded by members of his immediate family, including his granddaughter Srishti and grandson Siddharth, Bond spoke about how friendship has shaped his life. “My entire life has been woven around the strong bonds of friendship that have grown around me,” he said, describing close relationships that have often blurred into family. “Shrishti and Siddharth, Rakesh and Beena and others have all grown up in front of me, and family means friendship and friendship means family. Love embraces us all.”
Even as he acknowledged the challenges of ageing, his voice remained light and pragmatic. Now living in Dehradun for health reasons, Bond explained that he can no longer walk as much as he would like, and his eyesight has made it harder to write by hand. Yet he continues to produce stories by dictating them, joking that “every day should be a birthday” as he cut into a cake designed to resemble his new book’s cover.
Publishers and readers alike framed the launch as a quiet continuation of a much‑loved literary legacy. Sohini Mitra described Bond’s stories as a “cherished part” of Penguin’s publishing journey, noting that *All-Time Favourite Friendship Stories* brings together some of his most heartfelt tales to remind readers that friendship often arrives in the most unexpected places. For the latest generation of Indian children, many of whom grew up on screens, the collection offers a gentle counterpoint: stories that celebrate walks in the hills, stray animals, and the small, unplanned moments that become the most important relationships in life.
As birthday tributes poured in from across India and beyond, Dehradun stood as a fitting stage for a writer whose life and work remain inseparable from its valleys, trees, and small towns. At 92, Ruskin Bond continues to write with the same unhurried warmth that first drew readers in the 1950s, quietly arguing that, in the end, the smallest things - a friend’s unexpected visit, a quiet hillside, a handwritten story are very often the only things that truly matter.
A story of two tweets, a million–dollar ghost, and ten unexpected arrests. This story connects them through one sleepless weekend in Boston’s Indian diaspora and the FBI’s timelines.
Source
The Million-Dollar Ghost
On a gray March morning, the news broke like a crack of thunder through immigrant WhatsApp groups in New Jersey, Texas, and Gujarat.
Source
The FBI had raised the reward to up to $1,000,000 for information leading to the arrest of Ten Most Wanted fugitive Bhadreshkumar Patel, the man accused of killing his 21-year-old wife in a Maryland Dunkin’ Donuts and then vanishing into the folds of the diaspora.
Source
For eleven years he had been more rumor than man: a name whispered in Patel motel lobbies, a face half-remembered at garba nights, always “someone’s cousin’s friend” who had disappeared after “a family matter” went bad.
Source
Mothers used him as a cautionary tale about rage and marriage; fathers mentioned him in bitter asides about how one man’s violence could stain an entire community.
Source
Now the number—1,000,000—glared from phones like a second sun.
Source
Some saw justice finally gathering momentum; others saw danger, the fear that any brown man with the wrong haircut and the right accent might be stopped, questioned, or worse.
Source
FBI Boston announced that its Violent Crimes Task Force had arrested ten Indian nationals across Massachusetts, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio for allegedly participating in a sprawling criminal scheme.
Source
The details were still sketchy to the public—fraud and violence braided together, money moving through shell accounts, victims scattered across states—but the headline was enough: “10 Indian nationals arrested.”
Source
In Indian grocery stores in Burlington and Somerville, the story ran under softer fluorescent lights, retold with long pauses and lowered voices between the coriander and the garam masala aisle.
Source
In the span of forty-eight hours, two different narratives collided: one about a singular, almost mythic fugitive whose violence had started in a back room of a donut shop, the other about a network of suspects woven into quiet American towns.
Source
For those who lived in between—Indian by memory, American by paperwork—the tweets felt less like separate announcements and more like coordinates on the same map.
Source
Rhea’s Timeline
Rhea, a 29-year-old data engineer in Cambridge, first saw the million-dollar tweet during a late-night doomscroll between code deploys.
Source
She remembered the old articles she’d read years ago: the 2015 killing, the Dunkin’ Donuts in Hanover, the young wife whose American dream ended behind a swinging stockroom door.
Source
The FBI had added him to the Ten Most Wanted list in 2017, but over time he had drifted from the headlines into the uneasy folklore of the diaspora.
Source
Two days later, sitting on the Red Line, she refreshed her feed and saw the Boston tweet: ten Indian nationals arrested, Violent Crimes Task Force, multi-state operation.
Source
The local anchor mentioned the arrests in a brief segment—stock footage of FBI jackets, a map with glowing dots over four states, the line “all of them Indian nationals” delivered with clinical emphasis.
Source
An older man at the next table muttered, “First that Patel fellow on Most Wanted, now this. They’ll look at all of us like criminals.”
Source
His friend replied, “They already do. It’s just that now they have fresh headlines.”
The Anonymous Tip
Two weeks after the reward announcement, a tip arrived through the FBI’s online portal.
Source
The person didn’t give a name, only an email address that looked like any other throwaway account.
They wrote about a man who avoided cameras, who changed jobs often, who never talked about his past but always read news from home.
Source
Threads Still Open
On a quiet Sunday, Rhea sat by the Charles River and opened the million-dollar tweet again, then the Boston arrests one.
Source
The quotes, replies, and reposts had multiplied: some angry, some defensive, some celebrating, some grieving.
Somewhere in the Midwest, a man who might or might not be Bhadreshkumar Patel walked into a small store, careful to keep his face away from the camera above the counter.
Source
Between them stretched a digital trail of posts and appeals, headlines and case files, rumors and late-night conversations in far-flung Indian kitchens.
Source
The story of those two tweets wasn’t finished; it had only marked the points where the hidden work of justice briefly surfaced for everyone to see.
Source
