The serious business of asking questions

Priyadarshini Paitandy talks to members of Team Q, who say that conducting quizzes is still a nine-to-five job, albeit an exciting one.

CHENNAI, TAMIL NADU, 22/08/2015: Quiz Masters Sunithi S. Ramesh, Priamvada Viswanathan, Ananth Ramanathan and Ajit Kumar during an interaction in Chennai on August 22, 2015. Photo: K.V. Srinviasan

Ticking clocks, rapid fire questions, buzzers, that annoying feeling of knowing the answer but just not being able to recall… been there, done that? Then you aren’t new to the world of quizzing. Almost everybody, at some point, has been part of a quiz — in school, college, informal parties, corporate events, game shows like Mastermind and Kaun Banega Crorepati …

From being a hobby, quizzes are now serious businesses. “There are companies that have employees on their payrolls just to participate in quiz contests,” laughs Ananth Ramanathan, one of the founding members of Team Q. Started in 1999 by a city-based group of five working professionals and avid quizzers — Priamvada Viswanathan (a senior Government of India officer), Ananth Ramanathan (marketing consultant), M.K. Ajit Kumar (travel and conference organiser) and Sunithi S. Ramesh and Ramesh Janardhanan (founders of an IT solutions company) — Team Q researches content, frames questions and conducts quizzes. With quizzing becoming popular, this team has been a busy lot. “For weeks, we used to meet after work and research questions. Two days before a quiz, we are constantly in touch over phone and mail,” says Priamvada.

Ajit, who plays the role of the organiser, got the group together when he met Priamvada in 1999 at the ITDC World Tourism Quiz. “I was organising the contest and she was the winner.” The first quiz that was held in Ambassador Pallava was very retro with questions being read out from paper and answers being jotted down in pencils. “Things were then jazzed up with audio visual rounds, questions on screens… and that’s where Sunithi and Ramesh’s expertise came in. The duo can make almost everything as tech-related as possible,” says Priamvada. While she is the quiz master (a role she now enjoys far more than being a participant), Ananth does the bulk of the research. It comes from four newspapers a day, followed by four from the Internet, plus articles and over two hours of reading time. The other team members add that if Ananth is travelling for a month, when he’s back home he wants all the four papers and that means four multiplied by 30 days of newspapers.

Team Q tries to steer clear of the regular done-to-death rounds and comes up with new formats. They believe the ‘Who am I?’— a round where they show two pictures, which when put together reveals the answer — was introduced by them. Even though their question bank has around 20,000 questions, they ensure none of it is ever repeated. “Before computers, we used to note down questions. There are 30 to 40 books with hand-written questions neatly stored away,” says Ananth. Technology might be making things easier, but the group makes sure they have back-ups of all their quizzing content. No wonder then that they once sat up through the night backing up content.

Questions, they say, must be interesting and relevant, unless it’s something historical. For example, the introductory song for TheBig Bang Theory whirls through 62 monuments. At one of the events, the question posed to the participants was ‘How many monuments are in the song and what are they?’ It was a ‘facepalm’ moment for the participants when they couldn’t get them all. “But it always makes us happy to see them get the answers right. There are participants we’ve been seeing ever since we started out in 1999. They might have started out in an inter-school competition, moved on to inter-college and now turn up for corporate quizzes,” says Ajit. And gauging the mood of a contest, whether the contestants are able to answer the questions or not, Priamvada alters the difficulty meter. “The same question, depending on the way it’s asked, can go from 1 to 10 on the difficulty scale,” she adds.

The group has conducted World Tourism Day quizzes since 2005, inter-school, inter-collegiate, inter-club competitions, game show content and software for

Honeymoon Jodigal for Sun TV and

Honeymoon Travels on Surya TV. “Some quizzes last from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and I am on my feet all day long. But it’s the energy that keeps me going,” says Priamvada and adds, “Sometimes I feel like a mother shushing and asking the enthusiastic audience to not give out the answers in their excitement.”

Over the years, quizzing has certainly evolved. With fancier prizes (international holidays), Ananth feels like it has gotten far more competitive. The commercialisation to some extent has taken the fun out if it. “Companies conduct internal quizzes to shortlist and send their best. People also note down questions at our events. They try to find out where we are researching questions from. So, now we have to go one up on them and throw them a googly,” laugh the gang.