First flush

1. Which organisation’s first tweet was: “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010” ? And what would it happen to mean?

2. First lines of which work are these — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”?

3. Who first appeared in a 1934 short film titled The Wise Little Hen , a story based on the fairy tale, The Little Red Hen ?

4. Developed from Little and Big Willie and further refined in a prototype called ‘Mother’, what was first seen in the Battle of the Somme in 1916?

5. Who was to have debuted as a Pakistani military officer in Prem Pujari but appeared first as a police inspector in Sajan (1969) instead, before finally making waves with his performance in Gulzar’s Mere Apne ?

6. What was announced at the Moscone Centre on January 9, 2007, and finally made a public appearance in the US on June 29 of the same year at exactly 6 pm local time? The demand was so high that off-duty police officers were hired to guard stores overnight.

7. What started simultaneously between London and Bahrain and Paris and Rio de Janeiro on January 21, 1976, and finally ended in 2003?

8. What first did Reita Faria achieve for India in 1966 while still a student at the Grant Medical College in Mumbai?

9.Neel Akasher Neechey ( Under the Blue Sky ) was one of the earliest films directed by Mrinal Sen and featured Kali Bannerjee and Bikash Roy. What dubious first does it hold in Indian cinema?

10. Films again. What started with Singapore in 1940 and went on to Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio and Bali before finally concluding in Hong Kong in 1962?

Answers

1. This is the first ever tweet by Google. It stands for “I’m feeling lucky” in binary

2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

3. Donald Duck, his basic costume has remained the same over the last 80-odd years

4. The first battle tanks. The name ‘tank’ was deliberately used to confuse German intelligence

5. Shatrughan Sinha

6. The first Apple iPhone

7. The Concorde Air service started by both British Airways and Air France

8. She became the first Indian Miss World, beating 51 other contestants from around the globe

9. The first film to be banned by the Indian government for its overt political tones, though the ban was lifted after a couple of months

10.The Road To... series of comedy films starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, one of the most successful film franchises of the 20th century

BLINKJOY
 

Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster;

Twitter: @joybhattacharj

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