Questionable Characters. That is what I called our quiz team yesterday evening.
Every fortnight a post from The Living Room (TLR) would tickle my curiosity. It spoke of the long forgotten concept of quizzing, and sexed it up by describing how it was actually done in this trendy pub in uber-trendy Hauz Khas Village (HKV for the uninitiated). So, after many months of active procrastination, I dragged a trusting MH there yesterday. The idea was to sit in the audience and figure out what the whole thing was all about, while simultaneously downing copious amounts of sangria.
What we discovered, however, was that this quiz had a key differentiator - there was no audience. So, unless you were asking the questions or serving drinks and food, you were a team! There were eight of them in all, and included amongs them were the Questionable Characters - M and I...
I would rather not dwell on the one hour that passed by, ever so slowly, after the quiz begin. For those who insist - the sangria was decent, if too fruity, the food was quite good, the airconditioning worked reasonably well. And those comet like things whooshing above our head were all the unanswered questions. All unanswered. All of them. We emerged after that hour with zero points, and since there were no negative points, we ranked eight on eight. After we struggled outside through the deluge of admirers and the torrent of congratulatory messages, I got reminded of the quizzes of yore...
Thankfully, and thoughtfully, I had neglected to tell people there about my quizzing days when I was a callow youth. Those days at IIFT, when Croak and I would rumble around Delhi's campuses in Croak's broken down scooter, with his helmet askew and our clothes stinking, looking for a college which had a quiz on and where we could inveigle our way in... Or the 72 hour festival at IMT (called Passion, what else?) where for three days and three nights we competed in one kind of quiz after another; where we were participating in so many contests that they had to change the schedule to let us participate in all of them and win everything in sight... Or my first Brand Equity win, when I was with Titan, and won my first ever trip abroad - to Bangkok and HK.... Or the second win in 1997 held in front of three thousand people and televised live, where Pratap and I decimated the competition and were awarded tickets to London to watch the Spice Girls (ugh!). And those many many qualifiers, one where I answered the winning question* just before Notts (Ramesh Natarajan) could, and I can still here is unique voice croaking out "Shit. Shit. Shit". Or when I won my third Brand Equity, in 2005, when I was 35, much after the age that quizzers have faded away and given way to the young bright sparks from the IT companies...
And then there were the little quizzes. The ones at Mount Carmel in Bangalore, where the girls would actually let this bunch of super-geeky boys in to the girls college every fortnight , and then cluster around silently listening to the mumbo-jumbo flying around from their mouths, with the boys eyes hardly noticing them... Or the Indian Meterological Quiz, which I won in my 12th standard, out of faraway Ahmedabad and actually won a microscope (to watch cloud formations closely, I guess). And how I did not buy a single TV or washing machine or microwave oven for the first 5 years of my working life; I won all of them at various quizzes...
It was a great time. Now, perhaps it is different. Brand Equity is a soap opera. Printed quizzes are dead, effectively dismembered by Google and its ilk. Retained knowledge is no longer a competitive advantage, when there a profusion of screens with abundant search apps dumbing us down ever further.
But in TLR I saw hope, despite the drubbing. There was still an excitement around quizzing, partially fueled by the alcohol I guess, but still very much there. And the questions were great, the quiz master was super and the people were enthusiastic.
We will go there again definitely since it happens every fortnight. Oh, next time we will certainly have more ammunition with us. Perhaps persuade Croak to come along. And Nuts. And Suharsh. And maybe Notts, if he is traveling northwords. All those quizzers of yore... Perhaps call ourselves Forty Plus. It will be fun to see how we fare. We might still be last, futilely trying to grab at the questions whooshing above us, and coax our grey cells to think so laterally as they used to. We know one thing - even if we are a fifth of what we were years before, we will win those little books they give us prizes. All of them.
And if not, so what? There is always the alcohol. The food is good. The sangria is better. HKV is uber-trendy. And quizzing will win. Again.
*Question: "What in finance is the 3-6-3 principle?"
Answer: "Borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, golf by 3PM" - from Liars Poker by Michael Lewis
Every fortnight a post from The Living Room (TLR) would tickle my curiosity. It spoke of the long forgotten concept of quizzing, and sexed it up by describing how it was actually done in this trendy pub in uber-trendy Hauz Khas Village (HKV for the uninitiated). So, after many months of active procrastination, I dragged a trusting MH there yesterday. The idea was to sit in the audience and figure out what the whole thing was all about, while simultaneously downing copious amounts of sangria.
What we discovered, however, was that this quiz had a key differentiator - there was no audience. So, unless you were asking the questions or serving drinks and food, you were a team! There were eight of them in all, and included amongs them were the Questionable Characters - M and I...
I would rather not dwell on the one hour that passed by, ever so slowly, after the quiz begin. For those who insist - the sangria was decent, if too fruity, the food was quite good, the airconditioning worked reasonably well. And those comet like things whooshing above our head were all the unanswered questions. All unanswered. All of them. We emerged after that hour with zero points, and since there were no negative points, we ranked eight on eight. After we struggled outside through the deluge of admirers and the torrent of congratulatory messages, I got reminded of the quizzes of yore...
Thankfully, and thoughtfully, I had neglected to tell people there about my quizzing days when I was a callow youth. Those days at IIFT, when Croak and I would rumble around Delhi's campuses in Croak's broken down scooter, with his helmet askew and our clothes stinking, looking for a college which had a quiz on and where we could inveigle our way in... Or the 72 hour festival at IMT (called Passion, what else?) where for three days and three nights we competed in one kind of quiz after another; where we were participating in so many contests that they had to change the schedule to let us participate in all of them and win everything in sight... Or my first Brand Equity win, when I was with Titan, and won my first ever trip abroad - to Bangkok and HK.... Or the second win in 1997 held in front of three thousand people and televised live, where Pratap and I decimated the competition and were awarded tickets to London to watch the Spice Girls (ugh!). And those many many qualifiers, one where I answered the winning question* just before Notts (Ramesh Natarajan) could, and I can still here is unique voice croaking out "Shit. Shit. Shit". Or when I won my third Brand Equity, in 2005, when I was 35, much after the age that quizzers have faded away and given way to the young bright sparks from the IT companies...
And then there were the little quizzes. The ones at Mount Carmel in Bangalore, where the girls would actually let this bunch of super-geeky boys in to the girls college every fortnight , and then cluster around silently listening to the mumbo-jumbo flying around from their mouths, with the boys eyes hardly noticing them... Or the Indian Meterological Quiz, which I won in my 12th standard, out of faraway Ahmedabad and actually won a microscope (to watch cloud formations closely, I guess). And how I did not buy a single TV or washing machine or microwave oven for the first 5 years of my working life; I won all of them at various quizzes...
It was a great time. Now, perhaps it is different. Brand Equity is a soap opera. Printed quizzes are dead, effectively dismembered by Google and its ilk. Retained knowledge is no longer a competitive advantage, when there a profusion of screens with abundant search apps dumbing us down ever further.
But in TLR I saw hope, despite the drubbing. There was still an excitement around quizzing, partially fueled by the alcohol I guess, but still very much there. And the questions were great, the quiz master was super and the people were enthusiastic.
We will go there again definitely since it happens every fortnight. Oh, next time we will certainly have more ammunition with us. Perhaps persuade Croak to come along. And Nuts. And Suharsh. And maybe Notts, if he is traveling northwords. All those quizzers of yore... Perhaps call ourselves Forty Plus. It will be fun to see how we fare. We might still be last, futilely trying to grab at the questions whooshing above us, and coax our grey cells to think so laterally as they used to. We know one thing - even if we are a fifth of what we were years before, we will win those little books they give us prizes. All of them.
And if not, so what? There is always the alcohol. The food is good. The sangria is better. HKV is uber-trendy. And quizzing will win. Again.
*Question: "What in finance is the 3-6-3 principle?"
Answer: "Borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, golf by 3PM" - from Liars Poker by Michael Lewis
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