“We always read for information or pleasure,” my English professor would dryly state in college. Back then, at 18, I didn’t think the two went hand in hand. What was important to me was reading facts and recollecting them during quizzes to score points. Points were important, especially when there were cash prizes at stake — a difference of five points could mean a loss of Rs.2,500 or, in the case of business quizzes with plump sponsors, that amount multiplied.
So, it was natural for us quizzers to pore over Wikipedia articles, but keep that reading separate from our reading of, say, Paulo Coelho or Jhumpa Lahiri. After all, what question could possibly arise out of the boring Interpreterof Maladies ? The uninteresting method of memorising trivia from Wikipedia and marching to quizzes armed with that knowledge persisted for a while. We would see a keyword in the midst of all the text on the projector slides and hit the buzzer.
“This started as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Illinois…”
*BUZZ*
“MOTOROLA!”
But we hit a roadblock on bigger stages in open quizzes where questions were beautiful and complex and required us to be familiar with the literature associated with them. They were far removed from college quizzes, set in the eleventh hour with questions scraped from older PowerPoint presentations. This meant we had to shift focus from Wikipedia to books of all kinds: fiction, non-fiction, pulp thrillers, comics. Nor was the goal just scoring points. The stories behind the answers became important (think Dev Patel’s character in Slumdog Millionaire . He doesn’t cram his brain with trivia. There’s an emotional connect, a story behind every answer).
Books that contain facts within beautiful prose are the sources for these. Sample this: “In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.” (From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything ) Chances are you’ll never forget Rozier’s name after this. I can’t say the same if you encountered him on Encyclopaedia Britannica though.
I had a small Slumdog Millionaire moment once. “Who was the first man to set foot on the Hipparchus crater on the moon,” read the question. The teams before us listed the names of astronauts from the Apollo Missions. I picked up the mike: “Tintin!” I’ve never felt more ecstatic. You need to read Destination Moon thoroughly to crack that one.
Another memorable one was when the quizmaster asked: “What reason do travel guides usually give to unwary tourists when they want to know why temples like Khajuraho have erotic sculptures?” The answer: “So that the people in the aftermath of the bloody Kalinga War would be aroused to reproduce and get back the population on track.”
Apocryphal as it sounds, this is precisely what a character, Mr. Kapasi, says to an NRI family who come heritage-hunting in... Interpreter of Maladies .
ramakrishnan.m@thehindu.co.in
