Some of the better questions (Part 1)
Quizzing isn’t for everyone, they say. A fair assessment given how scared and conscious people get when asked questions without any context. Nobody wants to be in a place where they are not in command. Besides, what’s the point of knowing who was Time magazine’s couple (Mr. & Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek) of the year in 1937? But then, some of us don’t aim to know something with a fixed return in sight. We read about and learn utterly useless pieces of information, for the sake of knowing. It gives me a strange but valid calmnesss to be aware of my own failures when compared to the age (25) at which Napolean conquered Italy. Or how cassowaries are a living proof that dinosaurs once roamed this planet, not very differently—in manner—from the chickens we relish. Or why v is the only English letter that doesn’t stay silent in any of the thousands of words used. And, for good measure, when exactly the Church replicated the Caliphate in banning chess (too distracting, apparently). Many such tiny explosions of recorded facts and debatable truths.
Getting my drift?
In my defense, since early school days, I’ve been interested in trivia and what we used to call GK back then. Apart from being a diehard cricket fan and an aspiring cricketer, I was also a cricket trivia enthusiast; the sort who names the bowler (Eric Hollies) who bowled out of Don Bradman for duck in his penultimate innings, as well as the English cricketer (WG Grace) who refused to leave the pitch, or the West Indies cricketer (Rohan Kanhai) who was Sunil Gavaskar’s idol and his son’s namesake. I used to be hungry for knowledge back then that I devoured all possible magazines and books. Until Hansie Cronje’s fall, I had not only read every single copy of Sportstar from the ‘90s—used to get old discarded copies from raddiwallahs—but also collected the centerfolds separately. I was mad.
However, this behaviour wasn’t restricted to just one subcontinental sport; it extended to other areas of interest that I developed eventually: football, science, tennis, chess, literature, and so on. Others went to library to frame long answers for short questions. I scoured pages to find these nuggets that would condense those long paragraphs into 2-3 sentences. That’s how I made notes in my mid-teens. A pattern I continued through my disastrous engineering days, my fruitful but short journalism days, and my stressful but fulfilling startup days. That drive to break down huge rocks into polished pebbles of data is what also defines my kind of quizzing.
When Modiji extended lockdown in May of 2020, that’s the weekend I hosted my first quiz on Zoom. And it’s been over two years of constant online quizzing, with some of the coolest and knowledgeful folks in our different groups. I won’t be exaggerating if I said I am at my happiest while composing a deck for a quiz, and merrier while hosting it. Yes, it's time-consuming and quite a thankless exercise, but I enjoy framing questions and nudging answers out from the participants. There are several formats at play: some questions are verbose with a lot of hints and cross-connections to help crack the code; some questions are straightforward, some crooked, and some questions are predicated on images. Last year, I shared a series of Who Am I questions on this blog, and the responses were hilarious.
Today, I’ll share some of the better questions from the quizzes I’ve been a part of so far, and if you wish to take a stab at them, either leave your guesses in the comment box below or drop me an email on shakti03@gmail.com – one of the answers is ‘Nobody knows!’. Keep guessing.
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Good luck, friends.