Ode to a titan

Of all the illustrious clubs in Kolkata, Dalhousie Institute (DI) has a youthful vibe. Its deceptively small lawn plays host to the city’s only jazz festival every year. But that’s not what makes DI a mecca for the youth of a city which still values knowledge over style.

That credit goes to a towering, bespectacled man with a deep baritone. Neil O’Brien, Parliamentarian, educationist and former head of Indian Certificate of Secondary Education, was associated with DI for close to five decades. As the quizmaster of DI’s Open Quiz for more than 40 years, the titan shaped many a budding quizmaster.

Dhruv Mookerjee, actor, stand-up comedian and quizmaster, claims he owes much of his quizzing tactics to the legend, who died last month at the age of 82. “You didn’t need to be a nerd from Kolkata to know of Neil O’Brien in the 1980s and ’90s. I have friends from Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai who have grown up idolising the man,” he says. Neil’s DI Open Quiz was a landmark event in the city calendar. “It was not an ordinary quizzing event. IAS officers, techies, scientists from across the country took leave from work to be able to participate,” Mookerjee says.

Neil’s eldest son, Derek, a Trinamool Congress MP as well as a quizmaster, believes his father unwittingly shaped a style that many adopted. “He recognised the fact that there is not just one kind of knowledge. He gave equal importance to different genres, be it science, mythology or entertainment. That’s what you see in a quiz conducted by us (including brothers Andy and Barry),” says Derek.

Filmmaker Q, whose latest film was released on Netflix last week, acknowledges the role of the O’Briens in popularising quizzing. “Neil was so charismatic that people turned up at DI to simply watch him,” he says.

When Abhijit Das walked in through the gates of the DI for his first stint with its Quiz in 1999, he was barely 17. It was an unusually balmy December afternoon and Das remembers taking out his handkerchief more than once to wipe the sweat off his forehead. “That was the first time I attended a quiz hosted by Neil O’Brien. Before that, I had attended regional finals of the Bournvita Quiz Contest hosted by Derek, who was quite the superstar thanks to the popular show. But being part of a quiz hosted by Neil was special. From the moment he took the mike I was transfixed. He paid attention to each participant, be it a school student or an IAS officer,” says the Hyderabad-based IT professional, who is also a quizmaster. Das didn’t clear the preliminaries that day but he stayed till the end. The lawns of DI, as always, was a sea of humanity. “But there was method to the madness. It was like the legendary Coffee House sans cacophony. Here people spoke in whispers, so as to not give away the answers,” says Das.

The early birds got chairs, the rest spread newspapers and squatted on the lawn. Neil conducted the early rounds at a leisurely pace. “He let people settle in. He made it a point to not intimidate the teams,” Das says. It was Neil’s magnetism that made the youngster return every year thereafter, a few times as a participant and mostly as audience. “He ensured that quizzing was not an esoteric affair. I don’t know how to put it, but he had the ability to convert the most unlikeliest people. He brought a sense of empathy to the proceedings, which left even the audience member with no experience of quizzing feeling he or she could do this too,” says Das.

That “special ability” was because of Neil’s immaculately-crafted questions. According to Mookerjee, “He always prepared his own question list. And he kept them simple. That was the key.” He was not a showman but managed to command the attention of the audience with his confident body language and incisive questions. Neil never made the quiz about himself. “The magic of Neil was that most of his questions were easily decipherable. They were based on logic and reasoning. He didn’t show off his knowledge,” says Mookerjee.

The legacy of Neil lives on in the thousands of other quizzers the country has spawned over the last four decades. “Every time I frame a question that is simple and beautiful, I doff my hat to him,” Mookerjee says.

Debapriya Nandi is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata

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