Q: Had his work “been displayed at artistic exhibitions or showcases”? A: It had, at the 2014 Hindustan Times Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, where some of his grids had been colorized and dilated, every square the size of a fist. Q: Was there press on his accomplishments? A: Yes as one of the lone creators of American crossword puzzles outside North America, he’d been profiled in the New York Times and the Times of India.

When I spoke to him last year, he told me the criteria seemed like a puzzle to which he was the perfect solution. But the EB-1A (“achieve your way in”) was news to him. In early 2021, Ghogre came across a Forbes listicle titled “Seven Ways to Get Your Green Card in the United States.” Most of the methods were familiar: “marry your way in” (the IR-1 or CR-1 visa), “invest your way in” (the EB-5, for those with a loose million dollars).

I entered the ballroom grumbling because high-school baseball practice had made me late just then, Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times puzzle and the tournament’s organizer, was announcing that Ghogre was, by a few thousand miles, the person who’d travelled the farthest to be there. I first met Ghogre in 2012, in Brooklyn, at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (A.C.P.T.), an annual speed-solving contest in which crossword writers like Ghogre and me take over a Marriott hotel, playing Boggle, trading puzzle ideas, punning compulsively. One went to Mangesh Ghogre, a forty-three-year-old man from Mumbai, whose extraordinary ability is writing crossword puzzles. Of a half million permanent-residency visas issued in the fiscal year 2022, only one per cent were EB-1As. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services requires applicants to fulfill three of ten criteria for extraordinariness or, alternatively, to provide evidence of a major “one-time achievement.” “Pulitzer, Oscar, Olympic Medal” are the agency’s helpful suggestions. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and-in a tasteless bit of irony-the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S.

Spanish waves daily crossword clue