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Magazine
Quizzers everywhere
SEVANTI NINAN
R.V. MOORTHY
The "University Challenge" quiz ... TV has been the catalyst.
LAST fortnight the BBC's "University Challenge" series got going on BBC World. A spirited inaugural win by a team of lanky lads from IIT Madras raised that feel-good question again: how did India become such fertile ground for good quizzers? And how much does television have to do with it, that maligned medium always associated with dumbing down?
In 1985 Siddhartha Basu, who is conducting "University Challenge", appeared on the scene hosting Doordarshan's first ever TV quiz. Ask him today and he is inclined to credit TV with having been a great populariser of this mind sport, "It acts as a great big spur and is what catalysed the movement on the ground." But others like J. Krishnamurthy of K-Circle in Hyderabad make a distinction — TV quizzes, particularly something like "Kaun Banega Crorepati" (KBC), fuel general interest but they became possible only because of the extensive quiz network in the country. Certainly K-Circle, now 33 years old, pre-dated TV shows. Without a strong movement on the ground where would TV find champion quizzers?
And you need them for the top quiz contests: "Mastermind", "Brand Equity", and the "ESPN Sports Quiz". K-Circle has sent 10 participants to the "Mastermind" quiz. Quiz clubs like this one, the Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA) Bangalore and QFI (Quiz Foundation of India) Chennai and, more recently, online avatars like Quiznet have nurtured the "real quizzer" for years says Krishnamurthy, adding that the Internet has also made a huge difference to Indian quizzing. Large question databases are currently available on the Net.
Arul Mani of the KQA feels that the relationship between TV quizzes and quizzing fora is symbiotic. His association enables people running TV shows to get access to quizzing enthusiasts. It has coordinated an elimination round for participants from the State in contests like "Mastermind" and "University Challenge" on BBC. And its own activities benefit from the interest sparked by shows such as "Quiz Time", "Mastermind" and "KBC". "We're very kicked about `University Challenge' — college quizzing in Bangalore now has a lot of zip and dash to it and many new faces too."
Perhaps the movement on the ground would have got less of a fillip without TV quizzes. They've catalysed a burgeoning interest which has seen the Karnataka government sponsor a rural IT quiz, getting teams from 27 districts. Back in 1997, Basu did a literacy quiz called "Akshar Mela" which had neo-literates from Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi, quizzing with great gusto. The catchment area is growing: for "Mastermind", they had qualifiers from Yavatmal, Bundi, Salem. In a city like Delhi you have quizzing at government schools, at Tihar Jail where keen quiz events have been mounted for four years running, and among chief executive officers of organisations like the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII).
Vembu Venkatramanan of Let's Quiz in Chennai compares it to what "Antakshari" shows on TV have done for a singing game earlier confined to homes and clubs. "TV quizzes have kindled many a latent quizzing talent and brought them to the fore." Events on the ground today rope in numbers that were unheard of 10 years ago. The Hindu Young World Quiz for high school students was conducted last year at 10 Southern cities and Delhi with more than 2,500 teams. Big quizzes like the "Landmark Quiz" and "The Odyssey Quiz" in Chennai have 1,000 teams (of three members each) vying for eight spots in the finals.
But Krishnamurthy would still argue that with the exit of "Mastermind", there is a void in the serious TV quizzing market. "While the `University Challenge' Quiz might evoke interest for a couple of years, there is space for some hard core quizzing on TV."
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If you have a Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) connection to the Internet, chances are that you now take a dimmer view of public sector privatisation than before. For close to three months, all those stuck with VSNL as an internet service provider (at least in the Delhi region) have been harassed to death. No connection on some mornings, connection without mail on others, now you can only send mail, other times you can only receive. Many mails have just gone missing, something which never happened with the old VSNL. Or arrive three days after they have been sent. It was a freelance or home based journalist's nightmare.
Spam in the mailbox has replaced normal communication. Every third relative of a despot in the African continent wants your help in getting his or her money out, every quack with a recipe for enhancing the size of the male organ seems to have your e-mail id. The only spam in my Yahoo mailbox concerns peddling art work of the European and American masters, restricted to about two a day. VSNL is far more generous: some 25 offers for various kinds of services come flooding in on a daily basis. Finally, in the old days there was a helpdesk that responded at least some of the time. The new dispensation seems to have a wall in its place.
So what do the Tatas have to say? The chief of the internet service provider (ISP) business in Mumbai says all these woes are actually a side-effect of the company's earnest efforts at improving things. VSNL has seven lakh subscribers which it acquired through ad hoc expansion via 25 different domains. Each city ran its own ISP as a stand alone activity, all of which resulted in multiple billing systems and multiple mailing applications. So the effort has been to unify and streamline, migrate some 80 servers from all over the country to Mumbai, and then attempt to implement a variety of improvements at one place. It was all supposed to take a few days. It took a few months. Spam filters can be more effectively deployed from a single location, and this too is in the pipeline.
So did they explain any of this in coherent way to all the customers who had to suffer through this migration exercise? They did not. When will their service improve? It's begun to, they insist. Their webmail is being overhauled, additional services launched, additional executives have been deployed to respond to e-mails, and they promise that we'll get better accented English among other things at the revamped call centres. For starters, just a dependable mail service will do nicely, thank you.
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