Kolkata-based Jayashree Jayakar Mohanka ranked first in the eighth edition of the national solo quizzing championship MahaQuizzer, a written quiz conducted annually by Bangalore’s Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA). She was in the city to receive the award at the KQA’s quiz festival.
Mohanka, who was awarded this year’s Wing Commander G.R. Mulky Memorial Trophy for Quizzing Excellence for the win, started quizzing at the “inter-house boys-versus-girls competitions” at the Kendriya Vidyalaya schools she attended. And she got hooked to quizzing for a simple reason: “fun”. She has been quizzing for about 40 years now – “far too long,” she laughed.
She has finished in top spots in previous editions of the quiz; this year, a score of 81 correct answers out of 150 won her the top overall spot.
MahaQuizzer had separate prizes for top scores in the four categories: school, college, lady, and open. Mohanka, who won the Ladies category in 2010 and 2011, doesn’t support a different category for women. “There’s no reason why women should be worse at quizzing than men.” But why are there so few women in the quizzing circuit? (For example, there were only seven women in the top 100 scores this year). “I think society has different expectations of men and women,” she said. “Girls aren’t encouraged to be nerdy”. That said, she doesn’t think quizzing itself represents male interests. “It’s just general knowledge.” Mohanka runs an engineering business in Kolkata, and has graduated from IIM Calcutta. But she doesn’t necessarily take to business quizzes. “There is a finite set of knowledge in these quizzes, and you have to really know everything”. She prefers general quizzes, particularly MahaQuizzer. “It suits me, for some reason.”Questions in this year’s MahaQuizzer spanned a range of areas: from the first India-born person to receive the Nobel for literature, to the place where milk chocolate was invented (that’s Rudyard Kipling and Vevey in Switzerland, respectively). But Mohanka said she didn’t do any specific preparation for the quiz, explaining, “It’s not that I did do particularly well, I think the others did badly for some reason.”
Visit kqaquizzes.org for details of the KQA’s activities.
