Millions of Indian hearts will doubtless have puffed with pride on hearing that South Asians once again dominated the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the US, with 13-year-old Sameer Mishra winning by correctly spelling “guerdon”, a word that means, as I'm sure you'll know, “reward, recompense, or requital”. However, as thrilling as it is that a new generation of Asians is emerging as world leaders when it comes to knowing that “i comes before e, except after c”, a small bit of me couldn't help wishing that we Indians excelled in slightly cooler spheres of life, such as sport.

Indeed, I used to think that unsportiness was just a family affliction, with the Sanghera household's athletic achievements extending little farther than a third place in a sack race (my eldest sister), a victory in a West Midlands power lifting contest (Dad), and intermittent membership of Fitness First (me). But it turns out to be a cultural trait, with Indian nationals dwelling upon their disproportionate lack of international sporting success with the kind of intensity that Heat magazine reserves for discussing WAGs.

Hundreds of commentators have wondered out loud why an emerging superpower, with nuclear weapons and success in areas as diverse as software programming, business, family interference and religious rioting, is, with the exception of producing children who can run freakishly long distances at a freakishly young age, incapable of producing sports stars. Record books vary, but according to one set, the world's second-most populous nation has accumulated only 17 medals in Olympic history - and most of those in field hockey.

A great many factors have been cited to explain this lame haul - bad diet, corruption in Indian sports bodies - but two particular explanations crop up repeatedly, the first of which is a lack of investment. India, it is argued, doesn't have a world-class sports infrastructure, in terms of stadiums, pools, and arenas, and doesn't plough enough into developing talent.

More defensive commentators, meanwhile, argue that Indians are just as sporty as everyone else, but that their preferred sports are not represented at Olympic level - cricket and yoga, for instance. Some aficionados are even pushing for yoga to become an Olympic sport, insisting that if rhythmic gymnastics can fit the bill, so can exercises deriving from an ancient system of Hindu philosophy. The argument is, of course, ludicrous. Leaving aside the question of how you would measure the mystical union of the self with the Supreme Being in a state of complete awareness and tranquillity (which is the aim of yogic exercises), it is futile to suggest that we are anything other than an unathletic race. The few “sports” that Indians have managed to excel in on the international stage - cricket, golf, Formula One, chess, shooting - tend to be the most physically undemanding. Even I could probably give Monty Panesar a run for his money over 200 metres.

Money is not much of an excuse either. The lack of worthwhile tracks and stadiums hasn't stopped Olympic champions emerging from the likes of Cameroon and Mozambique and, besides, unsportiness extends deep into the Indian diaspora, large portions of which dwell in wealthy countries. It's not often that you see “Singh” or “Patel” adorning the back of a professional football shirt.

The dull truth is that it is impossible to isolate one or two factors to explain India's disproportionate amount of sporting failure, but before I contradict myself by doing just that, I should state that Indian women are excluded from the following hypothesis. There's a simple sociological reason for their virtual invisibility: Indian society is maledominated, and for too many women it is hard enough escaping the kitchen, let alone getting permission to practise throwing javelins in a field on the other side of town.

But to understand what's holding Indian boys back, it is helpful, I think, to examine a sphere where they excel: namely, American spelling bees. If you read interviews with winners, you'll find that there are three main reasons why Indians do so well. First, they get an extraordinary amount of support from family, with parents even taking days off work to help them to prepare. Secondly, Indian culture is fundamentally cerebral - we are a race of nerds - and Asian kids get a kick out of learning how to spell “taleggio”, and understanding that it is a “variety of soft cheese made from cow's milk in Lombardy”. Thirdly, they are obsessive.

In Sameer Mishra's case this obsessiveness was evident in the fact that he read 23 pages of the dictionary a day in training, but such intensity is a defining Indian trait, running through its culture like spice runs through its cuisine. You see it expressed in everything from the famous Indian work ethic to the mind-numbing length of Bollywood movies, and the bewildering idolatry of screen stars, who are so adored that when one of them - Amitabh Bachchan - once experienced an accident on set, a fan ran backwards for 500 miles in a pact with God to save his life.

Such obsessiveness and such intense family support should, of course, make Indians excel at sport - they are precisely the factors that lead to the creation of the likes of David Beckham. That they don't is due to Indians being so focused on cerebral endeavours - such as examination results, developing careers in medicine, and learning the correct combination of letters in the word “basenji” - which, I'm sure you'll know, is “an African breed of smallish hunting dog, native to the inner Congo regions, which rarely barks”.

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