Yes, that was S.R. Sidarth on television Monday night on “Jeopardy,” the long-running trivia game show.
Sidarth, now 24, is the man who gained notoriety during the summer of 2006 when former U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., called him “macaca” at a southwest Virginia campaign event. Sidarth was working as a Democratic video tracker, taping Allen’s public appearance that August day when Allen singled him out while speaking to the crowd at a rally.
A controversy over Allen’s use of the term, which some called racist but Allen insisted wasn’t directed at Sidarth’s ethnicity, erupted on the Virginia political blogosphere and spread to the media as footage of the remark zipped across the Internet.
That November, Allen lost his re-election bid to Democrat Jim Webb.
On the game show, there was no mention of the word “macaca” or Sidarth’s stint in the spotlight. He did not win the episode that aired Monday.
During a conversation with host Alex Trebek, Sidarth described himself as a law student and shared an anecdote about a religious pilgrimage to Tibet he took with his mother, Charu Narasimhan, riding a yak nearly 19,000 feet up the Himalayas.
When reached by phone at his Northern Virginia home Monday night, Sidarth’s father, Shekar Narasimhan, confirmed that the clean-shaven man on television was the same person who was enveloped in the infamous flap three years ago.
After graduating from the University of Virginia, Sidarth did campaign work for Democrats in Pennsylvania and interned on Capitol Hill before enrolling in law school at George Washington University, his father said.
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