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‘We congratulate the distinguished author of this monumental production, who is evidently in possession of a stupendous amount of astounding information.’ Those who remember their Sukumar Roy will surely recall these deathless lines from his play ‘Cholochittochonchori’, a wicked satire on the pedantry of a section of the Bengali intelligentsia at the turn of the nineteenth century.
I have long cherished the lines, not just for their comic appeal, but also for being an appropriate epigraph to an activity I pursued with almost mindless tenacity during my university days. I wasn’t the only one though. A whole generation of my contemporaries spent almost every waking hour thinking up the most esoteric questions and answering them. In one word: quizzing.
It may seem strange that I should mourn the passing of quizzing at a time when ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ is ruling the airwaves. Today, thanks to KBC, hundreds of wannabe quizzards are born every minute, swelling the ranks of that manic breed who believe that the entire universe can be reduced to a series of questions and answers. Walks there the quizzard who has not dreamt of complete world domination? Why, then, did I solemnly swear to give up quizzing the day Harshabardhan something-or-the-other created history?
I did so because I saw the KBC as a monster which had devoured everything else. Not the mother who devours the offspring, but the offspring which devours its mother. With the coming of the KBC, all other quiz shows instantly became redundant.
Contrast this with the scene in the early Eighties. Quizzing was the major and most prestigious event in campus festivals and carried a small cash prize: maybe rupees three hundred for a four-member team. For this princely sum, we took slow boats, failed to return home at night and gave ourselves stomach ulcers by surviving on watery tea.
At Jadavpur University, where I studied (and now teach), every week seven or eight teams participated in a sinister ritual called seeding quiz. The cumulative results decided which two teams would represent the university at college festivals. Alarmed at JU’s frightening appetite for quizzing, festival organizers had hastily legislated that not more than two teams from any institution could participate in the qualifying rounds.
And then there were the open quizzes. Usually held on the premises of the Dalhousie Institute Club, off Jhowtala Road (even the tram stop there was officially known as the ‘Quiz Stop’ for a brief, glorious season), these quizzes pitted the young Turks against the grizzled veterans. Presiding over this animated database was the genial figure of Neil O’Brien, the most recognizable symbol of quizzing in Calcutta. If you closed your eyes, all you’d hear would be frantic whisperings, hard self-slaps, whoops of joy and occasional groans, the last heard when Neil prefaced a question with the dread words: ‘In the days of the Raj....
Many of these quizzes went to the wire, necessitating the application of the tiebreaker. By then, the top two teams would work themselves up to almost a state of coronary seizure. There was no option of withdrawing, no sissy chickening out if you thought the question was too hard for you. In fact, many of the teams who won in these needle finishes would look completely blank when the deciding question was asked. Then, seemingly from nowhere, divine inspiration would descend and the most outrageous answer would turn out to be the right one.
All this would mean nothing to the wannabe KBC quizzard. Then consider the fine art of choosing a name for your team. A whole article could be written on team-names alone. I remember wasting a whole evening arguing about the name of a new team we had formed and eventually, in desperation, deciding to open a dictionary at random, twice. The first opening yielded the word ‘Jataka’, the second ‘hymn’. So we decided to call ourselves Jataka Hymn for all of one week.
But most teams persevered with the names they had. So you had names like TNT Tears, Liquid Sheep, Trendy Apes, Tepid Mania, Hattima-tim-team, Nutcrackers and Magnum, to name a few. Of course, there were also some terribly boring names such as the Lake Youth Club, Argus and so on.
Big money started coming into quizzing in the Nineties, leading to a whole new line of business in the form of quiz and trivia books, doing incalculable damage to the reading habits of school-going children. In the Eighties, it was considered bad form to ‘prepare’ for a quiz. Those who did always lost. Always. In the Nineties, some of the Eighties quizzards decided to sell their souls to the devil and write quiz books. In doing so, they did the greatest possible disservice to quizzing.
The process has now come to its logical end. An aging superstar, desperate to stay in the public eye, practically giving away money on demand. Like a medieval morality play, KBC dramatizes the most basic human emotions, like desire, avarice and yes, even love.
But whatever it is, it is not quizzing. That was in another time, another place.
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