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I don’t know how long quizzes have been part of the Indian experience of growing up, but they were very much around in the early Nineties, when I was in Class IV in Madras. One day some of us were asked to join on stage a visiting Derek O’ Brien, who I imagine was there for some sort of outreach event for the Bournvita Quiz. I remember the “Tann ki shakti, mann ki shakti ...” jingle being played at some point, and the gift hampers the top two teams got. Mine came third — and would have been second had our neighbouring team not intercepted the last question, to which I knew the answer: Craig McDermott. The question was something to do with the 1987 cricket World Cup. (You can tell I wanted that hamper.)
A few years later we had moved to Pune, and that self-same O’ Brien and the Bournvita Quiz Contest on Zee became a fixture in our living room on Sundays. (Little did we know then that the channel, or part of it, would morph into a rabidly jingoistic one and the pleasant presenter into a cantankerous politician twenty years later.) I remember clearly the intro song (“...Babaloobala, books, books, books!”); the green-suited Bookworm and his sing-song “You know, Derek...”; the variety of schools represented from across the country; the simple panels above the contestants which lit up depending on the theme they chose; the excitement of the tie-breaking buzzer rounds; and the utter Nineties middle-classness of it all (“My father is a bank manager, and my mother is a homemaker”). I looked forward to the show so much that I once wrote an essay on a school exam about the annoying experience of having unexpected guests when the BQC was on.
In those days there weren’t too many opportunities to quiz, except in the odd inter-house competition in school. It was only in Class XI, back in Madras-turned-Chennai, that quizzing became part of my self-description. This was courtesy of what we called “culturals”, essentially a series of two- or three-day non-academic competitions hosted by schools across the city, and an excuse for exam-battered survivors of the Class X year to celebrate their new-found (but short-lived) freedom by getting bonafide certificates and legitimately bunking classes to hang out in the wider (and sometimes co-ed!) world. Our contingent would have singers, Just-A-Minuters, debaters, quizzers, artists, dancers, and assorted others. It was serious business. You could earn a name for yourself in inter-school circles; you could even win a title like “Mr. Razzmatazz” and go home with a trophy and a brand-new bicycle. Although I did participate in a variety of events, it’s quizzing I remember having the most success in.
Quizzing in college was a new rite of passage, with written preliminary rounds, finalists announced on notice boards, large crowds watching the finals in a thousand-seater auditorium. It eventually led to the pinnacle of my quizzing career, an appearance on a nationally televised show with three college friends. To my embarrassment, almost the first answer I knew — and of course I had to say it in the interests of the team — was “lingerie”.
When I went abroad as a postgraduate student, I realised with a start that quizzing as a sport — if one can call it that — is inherently culture-specific. Pop culture was a closed book for me, and local history a matter of guesswork. The occasional question on India or its environs gave me the chance to stand out. I tried gamely for a while, then retired honourably.
Quizzes seem to have changed since my day. Now they go by the “pounce” system, which works like this. Every question is open to all teams. If you think you know the answer, you put your hand up and write down the answer. If you’re right, you get the points; if not, you get negative points. So, theoretically, every team that knows the answer has a shot at it, and the luck factor is removed. In a post-pounce world I would have scribbled Craig McDermott on a piece of paper and got that hamper. (I think.)
But oh, what a commotion it causes! Hands bobbing up and down. The quizmaster and two or three sidekicks running around to the teams, yelling their verdicts to the scorer (Team A, plus ten! Team B, minus five!). There’s a whole lot of head-shaking and high-fiveing, while the audience (such as there is) and the teams that didn’t take a punt wonder what the right answer was. And what the wrong guesses were. And on we go to the next question. As a spectacle and an experience it’s a disaster. It could only have been invented by the ultra-competitive quizzer for whom winning is everything.
Now as before, the varieties of quiz are legion. There’s the formal, corporate, televised quiz. There’s the open quiz held in an auditorium. There’s the quizzing association’s Sunday quiz where an in-crowd of geeks goes to hang out and keep their quizzing muscles limber. There’s the collegiate or inter-collegiate quiz. There’s the game-show quiz. Some — especially the TV show variety — prize quick reflexes and agility on the buzzer; others, like the ones we had in college, tend to be languorous three-hour affairs, where the ability to make up funny answers is as respected as knowledge of the right ones. Some quizzes are impersonal and businesslike; others, permeated by the antics of a larger-than-life quizmaster. Most people would agree that for a quiz to be fun for the participants and anyone watching, the questions have got to be “workable”. There’s no point asking for the name of the seventy-fifth Kaurava brother, because a team either knows it or doesn’t. Asking what’s unusual about Georges Perec’s novel, A Void , is less fun than displaying a passage from it and allowing the participants to work it out. Another characteristic of a good question is that the answer seems obvious once it’s been revealed. Of course, experienced quizzers know this, and factor it in when making educated guesses.
Nowadays, as a university lecturer, I sometimes pop by our students’ quizzes. And I’m sure they wonder how this supposed former quizzer (however mediocre) can be so clueless. You see, quizzes have always prized a knowledge of current affairs. And today, if you’re not on Twitter, you might as well be living under a rock. Still, it’s not all bleak. Recently my wife (also a prof) and I were invited to a quiz by her students. We came a respectable third, not by answering everything, but by resolutely refusing to “pounce”, thus avoiding all negative marks. Question: Which well-known cricket commentator, known for his love of kitchen sinks, would have called us “seasoned campaigners”?
