Quizzing - a personal reminiscence

Like many other Indians growing up in the 80’s, part of growing up was Bournvita quiz contest on the radio and Quiztime onTV. I guess that sparked the interest in quizzing.

The earliest quiz I can remember taking part in was at school in Kharagpur – probably in class 6. We had an inter-class quiz competion in school and I was part of the team from Class VI-B. There were 12 teams from Class V to Class X and 24 people on stage- that’s a huge lot. I remember very little about the quiz except that there was a question asked to us about Plimsoll lines which got passed along till the Class IX or Class X guys managed to answer it.

I moved to Pune at the beginning of Class VII, in 1987 to Bishop’s where in my later years I did represent the school a few times. However, when I look back, the big quiz event in those years was the inter house quiz competition in my class X. The results of the quiz went towards the house championships. And the number of points for the winning house (7) was the same as you would get for winning the athletics after months across all sorts of events. The quiz happened on January 26^th by which time the race for the winning house was hotting up - so it was fairly vital.

The teams were chosen on the basis of a written exam which the whole school took in December. I hadn’t come to school that day (I was recovering from jaundice and had a doctor’s appointment) so didn’t take the exam. But my house masters at Harding House(Mr Highland and Mr N D’Souza) wanted me in the team – I was one of the four or five people from Class X who regularly represented the school at various quizzes- Bala, Nabar, Manish Kaul being some of the others from my batch. So, they wanted the best team for the house. I believe Mr Highland had a chat with Mr Beaman (who organized the quiz every year) and convinced him to let me participate (my jaundice clearly helped).

I think most people expected Arnold House to win, as they had both Bala and Nabar in their squad- and they were both good- but we had a decent team (me, Nikhil Datta, Sumit Pokarna and Rishad Dalal) and in the finals we beat Arnold. I remember very little of the quiz - there was a question on Camelot and something on Kuldip Nayar…but we won! That I remember. And those points certainly helped Harding to win the house championship that year.

Like most good Indian students I spent the next couple of years studying for boards and in coaching classes, etc . So no quizzing at all.

I started quizzing again seriously in second year of engineering. I shan’t write much detail about my quizzing years at college as I have written a much more detailed post about it at http://notesandstones.blogspot.com/2005/11/history-of-bc-quiz-club-v-sancho-joins.html . I will just say a couple of things –

One, surprisingly to me, I turned out to be above average and indeed, in my final year at college, I was probably one of the better quizzers in the whole of Pune. I use the word surprising for 2 reasons - firstly, there was almost a 4 year hiatus in which I did no quizzing. Secondly, unlike many quizzers I saw and knew, I had no specialist knowledge of any sort and I knew nothing perfectly. I just knew a little bit of a lot of stuff (This, incidentally is the reason why I never bothered to go for Mastermind –I simply could not imagine doing a specialist round). But I still managed to do okay!

Two, quite unknowingly at that time, I was playing a part- and a fairly key part, even if I say so myself- in setting up something that has become quite institutionalized in an informal way via the boat club quiz club. We used to quiz every Saturday in our college’s boat club (my college was on the bank of the river and has one of the oldest active boat clubs in india) and somewhere down the line it has outgrown that and become something bigger and self sustaining. The credit for that goes to later years and people like Ramanand, Niranjan, Anand SivaSankar and many others I have never met. But in a small way, I have contributed to that and it makes me feel good. The boat club quiz club is the one of the things in life I am proud of having been part of and having contributed to its growth.

Once my engineering was done, I moved on to IIM Ahmedabad to my MBA. Didn’t quiz too much there but I did meet perhaps the finest quizzer I have ever known – Ravikant Avva (I have in later life met and have indeed quizzed against Kevin Ashman – who has won the world quizzing completion 4 times in the last 7 years and is currently runner up. And of course, we all know of Gail Trimble but I don’t really know either of them). Ravva knew so much, it was either scary or hilarious. How could one person know so much? I remember having some discussion with him about the Dasha avatar and he actually told me how one of the Purans actually mentions 24 avatars of Vishnu (and he rattled them off) and the Dasha avatar are just the principal ones. He also had this debate on one of our notice boards on the number of aunts Freddie Threepwood had…and it was scintillating to read it. I don’t know if Ravva is reading this but if you are…it was a privilege to know you and I hope you still quiz.

Once I started working I more or less stopped quizzing. I used to follow quizzing online via quiznet but almost no actual quizzing. Most of the corporate quizzing used to be business related and I was never too great on that. In any case, I was discovering theatre and urdu poetry those days and had many other things to do. So again, there was a huge hiatus.

In 2007, I moved to London and was introduced to pub quizzes. These are written quizzes – much like the elimination rounds in most Indian inter-collegiate quizzes – but while the entire crowd is having drinks, food and so on. It’s pretty good fun.

While in London, I met Shrirang again- Shrirang was my senior at engineering college and we used to quiz together in Pune. It was he who figured out the existence of the Quiz league of London and took me along for the initial meeting. The Quiz league was very different from quizzes in india as it was a four member team with questions asked to individual team members.

We decided to form a team (Wharfside) and pulled in people from office to get a complete team in the second division of the league. The league is played at pubs in a home and away fashion (each team having a home pub). It has meant that I have travelled to all parts of London and met all sorts of people I would never have met otherwise.

2008-09; our first year in the league was a disaster – we knew nothing of local Brit history and pop culture. Also, there was a lot of focus on classical music, paintings and so on. So, as to be expected we came in last. But towards the end of the season we had Colin join our team- who was good- very good.

In 2009-10 the league pushed a few other good people to our team – Emily, Den and Mike- so we didn’t end up last. But we were still in the bottom half of the division.

A number of new teams wanted to join the league in 2010-11. Also, some of the existing teams split up so the league got split into 3 divisions. And we were pushed into 3^rd division. But our team also split up. Ravi was going back to India. Emily and Den were travelling out of the country for during most of the league session. Mike wanted to form his own team with some of his friends so he told us that he would prefer to start a new team. That left Colin, me and Shrirang- not really enough to have a team. Then Colin was asked by Telstar (a division 1 team) if he would be willing to play for them. He asked Shrirang and me if there was any chance of us actually forming a team but that seemed really unlikely; so we told him to go ahead and join Telstar – after all he would get to play in the first division. That left Shrirang and me and we went back to the league and they put us in touch with Mark who was starting a new team – The Flutterers.

It was a pretty good team with Ian, Jan, Mark, Stephen, Angela and Johny being other team members. At the halfway stage of the league we were third or fourth in the table. We then had a loss to London Scottish (who were bottom at that point) by 1 point. But after that I don’t think we lost a game. Going in to the last game against Colin Campbell we were at top of the league four points clear of them. If they won the game they would catch up with us and would win the league because of better points scored during the league. So, we needed to win! The final score was 40-39 in our favour – and we had won the league!

So, now it’s back on to division 2 next year –let’s see how we fare.