Now that the first film on Indian quizzing is doing its rounds, it can be safely revealed that there was also an attempt to write a novel revolving around quizzing in the early ’90s. Four chapters of this opus were written, and some grizzled hands may still own the stapled photocopies. After beginning promisingly in the precincts of the Calcutta National Medical College, the novel meandered off to medieval France and ancient Greece, and was poised to enter the Amazonian rainforest, where a new nation-state called the PQR (People’s Republic of Quizzing) would be founded.

For R2C2E (Reasons too Complicated to Explain), the novel was not completed. But the first chapter, featuring a real-life quiz at a college fest in the aforementioned medical college, still retains the zest and crackle of the genuine article:

The quiz prelims are over in a flurry of scribbled sheets like snowflakes; though the atmosphere through which they float in serene drifts is far from cold; it crackles with all the tension of an Ascot Opening Meet. Volunteers pounce on the errant testimonials or engage in undignified tugs-of-war with the more tenacious quizzards. ‘Time’s up!’ shouts our QM... but Jhantu suddenly wakes up to the fact that he has forgotten to write his team’s name on his sheet, and insists on chasing it all over the room.

Have things changed at college quizzes? Not by much, I am told. The prelims are still written on sheets of paper, teams are still bunched uncomfortably close to each other, there is still much eavesdropping and fierce whispering. One had to be a student to sit in a college quiz, but the word ‘student’ was interpreted with utmost liberality, with a Std VIII prodigy locking horns with a doctoral candidate becalmed somewhere in his second chapter. No college quiz could be deemed complete without the presence of at least one ‘combined universities’ team, consisting, according to one witness, of ‘one JU engineer, one IIM cat, one out-of-work journalist and somebody’s sister from JD Birla’ (no offence meant to these august institutions). And of course, there was the eternal search for a pen, which, nine times out of 10, none of the team members has brought.

The quiz begins. Fast and furious fly the challenges to the rationality of the universe. Which household appliance is modelled on the human arm? Answer: the Terry Anglepoise lamp. What was the first standarised commodity to be mass-produced? Answer: Books. What does the word Manhattah mean in Naragansett? Answer: the place of the great booze-up. Anxious faces and sweaty palms prevail on the stage — not entirely because of the quiz, but over the nagging question of when the food will arrive. Unwary quizzards who eat too much have to eat crow as questions pass by their full mouths. But quizzards’ digestions, both of funda and dhop-chop are phenomenal. They thrive on both.

In the last millennium, questions would be read out from pieces of paper, or a card if you were feeling fancy. Now, they are projected on a screen, though the quizmasters still insist on reading them out in merciless detail. Visual rounds have however undergone a sea-change. From magazine clippings pasted on board or sheets of paper, or projected slides if the organisers had a budget, we now have extended video clips, or a collage of stills which exhorts the teams to ‘connect’. But the most radical departure has been in format, with the direct/bonus points system first replaced by infinite bounce, and then by the utterly deplorable pounce, in which teams raise their hands and whisper answers into the ear of the quizmaster in sequence. (The pounce is one reason why the writer of this article is currently on an extended sabbatical from quizzing.)

The tension mounts. CMC fluffs a sitter on stock market slang. Alu picks up a question on Edgar Rice Burroughs by the skin of his teeth. Joy makes a brilliant comeback in the audio round, identifying three out of four voices in an extended remix, by an amateur group, of a Dylan number that flopped in 1964. Ranjan Raychowdhury identifies the view from the eastern corner of Eiffel Tower. Anup unravels a question of horrible obscurity on South Indian dance forms, Benjamin Zacchariah boosts JU ‘A’ with a youthful picture of Jimi Hendrix. Pagla of NRS rises magnificently to the occasion and not only gets his direct but also cuts off two bonus point heading towards...

...and so it goes. Elsewhere I have written about the beginnings of what can only be described as militant trade unionism in quizzing. There was an edition of Xavotsav (the St Xavier’s College festival) in which the organisers had behaved in an extremely high-handed manner with quizzards at the prelims. The main rounds were slated for the following day, but at a hastily convened roadside meeting of the PQR (Politburo of Quizzing Rebels), it was decided that a parallel quiz would be held the next morning. History records that Ashok Malik and I stayed up all night to set questions, and the parallel quiz was duly held in the college gym the next morning, despite heart-rending pleas by the organisers to get off our high and pommel horses. The institution soon became popular, with quizzards taking a perverse delight in travelling long distances to fests and holding a parallel quiz under the nose of the organisers, usually to protest the selection of incompetent quizmasters.

If college quizzes were our bread and butter (the prize monies, though meagre, were much sought after), then open quizzes literally stood for beer and beef rolls, dispensed liberally at the Dalhousie Institute on Jhowtala Road. We would take trams to the venue, and for a brief season the stop had even been rechristened ‘Quiz Stop’ by the municipality. The quizzes would take place in the evening, on the basketball courts, in an atmosphere of cordiality and good cheer, frantic whisperings, self-slaps, and occasional groans when the question was prefaced with the dread words ‘In the days of the Raj...’. It was a very different league from college quizzes, with the students’ teams having to work very hard to challenge the supremacy of the club teams.

Nearly three decades have passed since, and nowadays my only contact with quizzing is being the treasurer for the campus quiz club, and withdraw funds from the university during their annual quizzing event, ‘Qriosity’, which also functions as a reunion of sorts, with math department alumnus Joy Bhattacharjya as the fixed quizmaster for the general quiz. Qriosity started off as a college quiz, but a few years ago, they rashly threw it open to all comers. What resulted was a massacre of innocents, as the tribe descended on the campus on a Sunday afternoon in fleets of cars, with at least two of them flashing the sarkari red light. Like grizzled mastodons bellowing at each other across the tundra, the old-timers joined battle and made mincemeat of the young ’uns. To my great mortification, I was part of the bloodbath and, therefore, it is a matter of some relief that I have failed to clear even the prelims in my last two attempts.

... The quiz is over. Tintin dashes off, muttering something about the writing of the next installment of his quiz saga. Debkumar and Jaideep Mukherjee have a friendly argument over who missed the most questions. They appeal to A--- to arbitrate, but he is in no mood. Dodging Saurav Sen and Ashok Malik, who are busy thrashing out the vagaries of the Macedonian succession to their own satisfaction, he stumbles out into the pale discouraging monsoon daylight to hail a passing S14, smarting over the injustice of fate and resolving passionately to get his own back on Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos at the nearest opportunity.

(With acknowledgements to Rimi B Chatterjee)

Abhijit Gupta is Associate Professor of English at Jadavpur University

comment COMMENT NOW