The Question is the Question

Dilip D’Souza considers the evolution of the modern Indian quiz away from general knowledge, towards elegance and an endless curiosity

Something about the text on screen murmured “Falklands” to me. Much later, when I looked at it again, and more leisurely, I could point to what. But then, in the heat of that frantic moment, I didn’t know. The word had popped into my mind, is all. I leaned into a pow-wow with my team and muttered it. One of my teammates’ eyes lit up and he whispered excitedly, “Oooh! That fits, that fits! I’ve got Borges!”

The other stuck his hand in the air and bellowed, “Pounce! We’re pouncing!” (Meaning we’re answering out of turn, gambling that we know the answer).

The quizmaster stepped over, offering his ear. Cupping both hands over it, my teammate said “Falklands War, Jorge Luis Borges”. The quizmaster nodded, pointed to our team and announced: “Team 3, 10 points!”

Much later, I read the question again:
“‘Juan Lopez and John Ward’ (1985) is one of the last poems published during its creator’s lifetime. The poem ends with the following lines (translated):
They might have been friends, but they saw each other face to face only once, on some overly famous islands, and each one of them was Cain, and each was Abel.
They were buried together. Snow and corruption know them.
The incident I mention occurred in a time that we cannot understand.
Which historical event forms the backdrop of this poem? And if you get that, it should also help you identify the poet, whose 115^th birth anniversary we observe today.”

Why did “Falklands” jump out at me from these lines? Consider: There’s the word “islands”. The date, 1985, which was soon enough after the actual date of a benighted war—“a time that we cannot understand”—that it might still have been fresh enough in a poet’s mind for him to write about it. The two names, one Hispanic, one Anglo. The “might have been friends”. The “buried together”. Even “Cain” and “Abel”.

Some of all this also said “Borges” to my teammate, if not to me. Except that Borges is Argentinian, and I know nothing about him or his poetry. If you asked me to name anything he has written, or identify a given passage as his work, you’d draw a blank. But we put our heads together and, because we listened to what the hints sprinkled through the question were telling us, got our ten points.

This is not to suggest that we deserved any accolades. Even with those points, we finished the quiz fourth out of eight teams. Firmly middle-of-the-pack.

Quizzing in India has a history that goes back decades. It got widespread attention across the country with the Bournvita Quiz Contest (BQC), a face-off among schools that kicked off in 1972. We of that vintage spent years listening to it on static-ridden medium-wave. In my home, it burbled forth from our gargantuan Nelco Novella set, the one with burnished metal inserts in a frame of make-believe wood. Following the BQC was the thing to do with family and friends, much like with today’s Kaun Banega Crorepati.

But I always felt a small personal connection to the BQC that went beyond trying to outdo contestants on the radio. As a pre-teen considered good at what we called “general knowledge”, I was part of what we were told was the pilot BQC show. Three of us on my school team, three from a school up the road. If memory serves and it was indeed a pilot, we must have performed well. Forty-two years on, the BQC remains an institution, though it’s been on TV since 1992.

Illustration: By Two Design/Hazel Karkaria and Somesh Kumar

All I remember any more of that long-ago session are two questions. One was about the Ashanti people in West Africa (probably, “Where in the world will you find the Ashanti people?”). The other was about the race-car driver Jackie Stewart (“Who won the Formula One World Championship in 1971?”). I remember them because these were the only questions I could answer.

These were also typical of general knowledge, or “GK”, which really was a fancy name for otherwise useless bits of trivia that either were or were not squirreled away in remote recesses of our brains. The BQC was a celebration of such GK. Take these excellent examples from their Bournvita Book of Knowledge: “In India, which dynasty used gold coins for the first time?” and “Which reptile’s scientific name is Naja naja?” The BQC website, which commemorates four decades of the contest, even lists a question asked sometime in that inaugural year of 1972: “On what date was the historic Simla Agreement signed?” Nothing in those words murmurs anything at all—no, not even “Falklands”—to me. You have to choose among these four options: 16^th March, 2^nd July, 4^th November and 26^th December. You either know it or you don’t, and I don’t.

In the small pond of my school in those years, I was good enough at this stuff to be on this GK team or that one. But after listening to many BQC radio shows, I began to wonder what the virtue of it all really was. For doing well, you were feted as a “brain”. My teammates thumped me appreciatively on the back because I knew about Ashanti and Stewart and we collected our points. Yet what intelligence did it test? How did knowledge of Jackie Stewart make me any brighter than the guys in the other team, who passed that question on to us because they had not heard of him?

When that dilemma came to me and found no good answer, I switched off quizzing. It must all be like this, I thought: an exercise in setting and answering questions about ever more arcane trivia. You knew the trivia or you didn’t. Period.

***

Many years later, I got a sense that some things had changed with quizzing. Oddly enough, it was via the BQC, if another BQC. My friend, the journalist Samanth Subramanian was in town and called one evening. “There’s a cricket quiz tomorrow,” he said. “I want to go, but I don’t have a partner. Want to join me?” Organized by the Bombay Quiz Club, it was in a large hall in the northern suburbs, filled with boisterous young men wearing, it seemed, either crumpled t-shirts or carefully pressed button-down oxfords. They would sometimes shout “Audience question!” and sometimes exhale a satisfied “Aaah!” when the answer to a particularly thorny question was revealed.

Samanth and I were eliminated in the preliminary round, but we spent a happy couple of hours in the audience, watching the four finalists duel. A long-time and expert quizzer, he was used to how it went. But I wasn’t, and through most of that evening I marvelled at it all. The enthusiasm. The ambience. The lingo. The way teammates fed off each other and teams fed off each other. The way a little tidbit of information would seem to almost visibly speed through the hall, gathering weight as it went until it became a full-fledged answer somewhere, that spot identifiable by its sparkling eyes and knowing smile and eagerly raised arm.

But most of all, I marvelled at the questions. These were to the “Where will you find …” and “Who won the …” tests of your factoid reservoirs as bullet trains are to bullock carts: there is simply no comparison. Almost never were they answered right off the bat. Instead, the teams would confabulate and make what’s better described as an educated guess. Sometimes they’d even briefly explain their thought process, eliciting a “Good answer, that’s a very good answer!” from the quizmaster. To me, who had known quiz questions to produce only right answers, wrong answers or total ignorance, this was strange and wonderful territory.

A further few years later, I sat in on one of the regular Sunday meetings of the BQC—Bombay, not Bournvita. We met in the office of a web startup, guarded on this lazy afternoon by two lonely security men and a sleeping dog. Three or four members were already there, already filled with nervous energy and excitement. One set up a screen and projector, but couldn’t get the projector to switch on. “Never mind,” he said, “it will work by the time Abhinav gets here.”

Dapper in glasses and a rust-coloured shirt, Abhinav Dasgupta arrived soon after. Sure enough, the projector suddenly sprang to life, a connection that was never explained to me. He and another member, Rajeev Chakravarthi, were the quizmasters that day and busied themselves connecting a laptop to the projector. “Going to be a good one,” said Rajeev, passing out sweets he had brought from a recent trip to Jaipur. “I really enjoyed Abhinav’s questions.”

When we reached a quorum of some 20 or 25 people, Abhinav typed their names into a list on his screen. For each name, he pulled up numbers between 0 and 1—calculated to six decimal places, no less—that are, I learned later, weighted averages of individual scores over the previous year of BQC quizzes. (On my second visit, I had a score as well: 0.488846. Perhaps the process of how I got that number will some day generate a quiz question by itself.) The top eight scores were the seeds for the day: each name was assigned to a team and the rest of us were divided randomly among them. This ensured, of course, that the top scorers were competing against each other.

With everyone settled into teams and the projector cooperating, and the nervous energy reaching a peak, Abhinav said, “All ready? OK, let’s go!” Only seconds later, I had the Falklands on my mind.

Some days after that, I met Abhinav and his girlfriend, Maitreyi Gupta, for dinner in an elegant black and grey-toned Chinese restaurant. I wanted to talk about quiz questions, but we also talked about the pair of them, a rare quizzing couple.

If there’s a remark that gets quizzers rolling their eyes in exasperation, it’s this chestnut: “There are so few women quizzers!” I may have involuntarily passed some kind of test when Abhinav introduced me to another quizzer by email saying: “I can assure you that questions like ‘Why aren’t there women in quizzing?’ won’t feature prominently in his discussions.” Nevertheless, exasperation aside, this shortage of women is an immediately apparent feature of quizzing. As a consequence, if there are few women who quiz, there are even fewer couples who quiz.

Maitreyi used to be a regular at Pune’s Boat Club Quiz Club (BCQC). Even though she was usually the only woman there, she always felt like she was just one of the guys. She said this with actual appreciation, grateful that they did not patronise her. That sense reminded me of my mother, who had the opposite experience being the lone woman among a gang of men playing badminton at a club near our home. Her partner would invariably advise her to stand idle at the edge of the court and let him take all the shots, an attitude that so annoyed her that she made it a point to stick her racquet out and intercept the shuttlecock at unexpected moments. Maitreyi didn’t have that kind of insulting memory from the BCQC sessions. Even so, when she first met Abhinav at one of their quizzes, she was drawn to him because “he treated me like a woman, which was a welcome change”.

There’s being treated like a woman, and then there’s being treated like a woman.

Maitreyi found those Pune quiz gatherings, with their wide-ranging conversations, thoroughly refreshing. These were intelligent, stimulating people with all kinds of interests. In some quizzers, this might easily translate into a certain arrogance. I’m thinking of a crass and aggressive competitiveness I’ve occasionally seen. I’m thinking too of a small group I was once in an argument with, one of whom sought to end it by asking me, “Do you even realise how bright we are?”

But Maitreyi actually explained it this way: “I like spending time with people smarter than me.” That’s typical. Quizzers like hanging out with other quizzers because they are smart and endlessly curious about the world.

That very curiosity has a direct bearing on how questions are found and framed these days. For Rajiv Rai, a BQC member even in absentia in Hong Kong, the best source of new and interesting questions is the, well, questioning of everything around you. For example? Flight staff routinely dim the lights and ask you to keep your window shades open when taking off or landing. Fellows like me follow these instructions without a thought, which helps explain why I’m a dud at quizzing. But quizzers like Rajiv are curious by default. They ask themselves, “but why?” They’ll start digging, and they’ll find there’s a perfectly good reason for this—that the staff wants your eyes adjusted to light levels outside. When you have to leave the plane quickly in an emergency, you shouldn’t be blinking furiously while your pupils shrink or dilate.

More of what’s around you, courtesy Rajiv: flowers that are fragrant at night usually are white. Every “POWER” button in the world, remote control to laptop to phone, has that same odd symbol on it. Teams in cricket, football and hockey, but no other sports, have eleven players.

Why, why, why?

Many quizzers quickly wearied of GK-type questions, as I did. On Twitter, there’s even a mildly disparaging hashtag for them: #kolstylz. That’s short for “Kolkata style”, a reference to Kolkata being generally acknowledged as the heartland of Indian quizzing, but in that GK style. Joy Bhattacharjya, who ran a Kolkata quiz I attended a few years ago—where, again, I didn’t get very far—calls these “WTFC” questions.

You know: Who The Fuck Cares what the capital of Bolivia is? WTFC what Sunil Gavaskar’s average is to two decimal points?

#kolstylz is probably an unfair moniker. Like elsewhere, there are serious quizzers in that cultured city, who yearn for complex questions whose answers you can work out. Still, there’s the crux: “workoutability” is really key. You read the question, absorb the hints, let the cogs in your mind grind away as time permits, confer with your teammates, and then come up with an answer: that’s just the kind of effort quizzers crave and celebrate. The kind of effort where “you don’t know the answer cold,” as Samanth told me. “Instead, you work it out. That’s the high.”

That’s just the kind of question quizmasters try to set, every time. The challenge, and it isn’t a trivial one, is to find an intriguing nugget of information—the funda—and turn it into such a question. It can’t be something terminally obscure. Nor can it be so easy that all the teams are leaping to answer it even before you finish reading it out.

Keep those things in mind, and you find that “what”, “who”, “when” and “where” questions are rarely interesting. That’s #kolstylz. WTFC. But the “why” and “how”: now there’s the holy grail.

Why did quizzing in India evolve in this way, to this point? After all, this is a country in which education still heavily rewards learning-by-memory. Why the very antithesis of that, in quizzing?

I’ve always felt there’s a simple answer. There are only so many facts you can cram into one brain. Others I asked expounded on that theme. To Devangshu Datta, a Delhi quizzer, this was waiting to happen. People were “mining the same sources of information. So you had to make the questions convoluted”. Hemant Morparia, doctor and razor-sharp cartoonist, used to be a regular quizzer too. For him, “once a question has been asked”, meaning the straightforward Bournvita kind of question, “it extinguishes itself.” It can’t be asked again. So what’s a quizzer or quizmaster to do next? Morparia managed some mathematical poetry with his answer: “Quizzers branch out like fractals, into the minutiae, looking for questions in the interstices of knowledge.”

Especially with the coming of the internet, the image of an endlessly intricate fractal is a very real one. Suddenly a fact you learn doesn’t have to be just that; instead, it’s a place to start mining all manner of related information, chains of association that lead you into new territories altogether. And all of it is fertile ground for questions.

Some of this happens elsewhere too, of course. In the US, UK and Canada, school and college quiz teams have long followed a particular competition format (sometimes called “quiz bowl”, or “academic bowl”). Many questions asked there would qualify as #kolstylz, but some are more elaborate. Carefully framed to reveal more and more information as you read through, they are known for that reason as “pyramid” questions.

Here’s one that featured in a Florida meet in 2007:

Although no authentic portrait of this man has ever been found, he is described as being big and strong with an air of regal dignity. He was knighted at the age of 15 by King Henry I of France and was successfully dealing with threats of rebellion and invasion only a few years later. Upon the death of his cousin, Edward the Confessor, he claimed the throne of England but first had to defeat Harold II. Commissioner of the Domesday Book, name this man who claimed the English throne after a famous battle of 1066.

Note how there’s more revealed about the man with every sentence. But note too that the more well-known the fact, the later in the question it appears, all the way till the final word. Or number. By itself, 1066 says “William the Conqueror”, loud and clear. Therefore, don’t give it to the contestants till the very end.

Could be an Indian quiz question.

In the mood to test him, I tossed Samanth a nugget. In the mathematician John Allen Paulos’s book Once Upon a Number, I found this WB Yeats quote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Could Samanth turn it into a question, and if so, how? Without even much of a pause, he shot back: “Put up this quote, an image of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and show a clip from the film No Country for Old Men. Then ask, ‘How will you connect these three?’”

The answer, of course, is Yeats, because those two titles are also from Yeats. “Nice”, I said, admiringly. “But this would be a lower level question,” said Samanth, rather deflating me. It’s not one he would ask at a serious competitive quiz. Why not? “Because quizzers know that Yeats quote well,” he said. “Then it gets just too easy.”

But in this vein, sometimes you stumble on a few lines that spell out a funda by themselves; that you can take, nearly whole, and pose as a question. For Samanth, those are “glorious moments”. He is especially proud of what he did with the lead of an article in Smithsonian magazine:

On a flight home in 1963, X was looking over some notes for a new game show. His wife asked if it was the kind of knowledge-based game she liked.

Since The $64,000 Question, X explained, the network didn’t let him do that kind of show. The rigging scandals of the 1950s had killed off the public’s trust in such shows, and viewers always suspected that the contestants were being given the answers in advance.

Identify X. What did his wife suggest as a way out?

The sprinkled clues, once more: 1963. Then, “new game show” and “knowledge-based game”. Finally, “that kind of show” and, especially, “answers in advance”. If they manage to evoke Merv Griffin, Jeopardy and that show’s innovation of turning questions into answers, you’re connecting the dots well, and you’ve answered a quiz question about a quiz show.

It is taking shape, this idea of what makes a good question. For Rajiv Rai, it must have “a workoutably memorable answer, the kind you can use later in a pub conversation”. For Aniket Khasgiwale, who set the next BQC quiz I attended, it will have “relevance, resonance, workoutability and humour”. For Saranya Jayakumar, revered doyenne of early quizzing in India, it’s important to get to the “origin of things”. For Atri Bhattacharya, a regular in the Kolkata circuit, a question should “make connections”. For Arul Mani, whom more than one quizzer described as the “best quizzer in India”, it is “beauty”. For Samanth, there should be “elegant logic, and both those words are important”.

Much of this language struck chords in me I thought were long buried. In a past life, I earned a degree in computer science and worked in software. To the best programmers I knew, writing software was an intensely creative process, every bit as much as writing poetry or prose. In doing it, they invariably sought to make connections between ideas, get to the core of the problems they were tackling, cut the flab, strive for clarity and logic. These were lessons I tried hard to learn and use in writing my own programmes, and later, in my other writing too.

How delicious that quiz questions evoke some similar thoughts. When quizzers “get” a particularly stimulating question, you might hear a collective “Aaah!” That, Samanth told me, “is the sweetest sound any quizmaster can hear.”

That was the loudest chord. Above all, there is elegance. If quizmasters seek it, programmers do so too, and with a passion. When your peers tell you you’ve written elegant code, that’s a sweet sound indeed. My boss, herself an eminent computer scientist, once described a problem I had managed to solve to her colleagues. “His design was simple and elegant,” she wrote, “and the implementation was clean and it’s robust.”

That was far and away the high point of my software career. A quarter-century on, that memory still lifts me.

For a few seconds at the Chinese restaurant, I actually drifted off on this gentle upswell of programming nostalgia. Until I remembered that I wanted to ask these two about Carlo Gébler.

In late 2013, explained Maitreyi, a Facebook profile under that name was born. Spreading likes, friend requests and pithy comments among Indian quizzers with mysterious generosity, this Gébler was quickly the talk of the fraternity. Though it wasn’t the first time. In previous years, Banana Singh and Ardeshir Jussavala have similarly flummoxed quizzers. For his part, Gébler claimed a 1954 birthday and a Bangalore home, but offered nothing else about himself—and who knew if those details were true either? Or even if he was really a “he”? Clearly a clever fake, he had plenty of people in a minor frenzy of speculation.

Naturally, the enigmatic Mr Gébler himself became grist to the mill of quizzing questions. There is a real Carlo Gébler, and he is an author, the son of the Irish writers Edna O’Brien and Ernest Gébler. In his BQC quiz, Abhinav framed a question around O’Brien, mentioning that she had married “Ernest _____” (the blank, so as not to give away the name). Then he asked: “How did the name of their son, a writer in his own right and Bisto Prize winner for his children’s novel Caught on a Train, cause much intrigue among a lot of people in this room towards the end of 2013?”

Not a question suitable for a more public quiz, clearly. But in that intimate setting, it sparked plenty of cheerful memories.

Who Carlo is remains unknown. Abhinav says he has always suspected it was his quizmaster partner, Rajeev Chakravarthi. Rajeev laughed it off. Others I’ve checked with have merely smiled; one asked “Who?” rather too quickly, I thought.

And Maitreyi? When they first met and got talking, she became convinced Abhinav was Carlo. To her, this only multiplied his appeal. As we tucked into our lemon and coriander soup that evening, she confessed to me—or was it to him?—that she had thought this entire escapade “was a perverted way of getting to me”, on his part. The way she said it, I knew “perverted” was a synonym for “charming”. If it was him, it evidently worked. If it wasn’t, well, he got to her anyway.

He scoffs at the idea, but it’s not a bad guess to make about Abhinav. He’s used Facebook to diligently build a reputation for himself, even an alter-ego of sorts. His friends there now call him “The Mourner”. This comes from his habit, when a prominent figure dies, of posting “Abhinav Dasgupta mourns XYZ” on his page: Khushwant Singh, BKS Iyengar and Gabriel García Márquez in that way in 2014. This is so much part of his persona now that some people greet him with “Good Mourning!” On the day of the September harvest festival in Kerala, someone remarked to him that while others celebrate Onam, “you celebrate Mournam”.

The man is fascinated with death. Abhinav appeared in Furiously Curious, an affectionate 90-minute film about quizzing that another quizzer, Sarat Rao, shot between 2011 and 2013. Early in the film, we see Abhinav wandering among graves, lingering over headstones and epitaphs. “I am what they call a tombstone tourist,” he admits. On his laptop, he pulls up his photograph of Jules Verne’s famous grave, where we see Verne himself breaking his tombstone and reaching high. Abhinav tells the camera:

“That’s just so evocative of Verne’s works. He’s been so futuristic, writing things that people would’ve never imagined in the 19^th Century. Stuff like From the Earth to the Moon in the 1860s, a hundred years before people actually went to the moon. Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth … So here you have a representation of the man whose imagination is not going to lie six feet under with him. He and his works are going to attain reality … A beautiful grave. One of my favourites.”

Naturally, tombstone tourism offers plenty of material for quiz questions. Both Abhinav and Maitreyi spoke appreciatively of “Quizza Macabra”, a death-themed quiz he and regular quizzing partner Shubhankar Gokhale conducted early in 2014. Several photographs in it are his own. Verne’s tomb figures there as well. Typical both of this interest in death and the kinds of questions quizzers like tackling is this one that Shubhankar came up with:

When X, born in 1835, learned that it was also the year of Y, he said that it would be the “greatest disappointment of my life” if Y were not around at the time of his death as well.

Sure enough, X died the day after Y returned on 20 April 1910.

Identify X and Y. If it helps, your quizmasters believe they will die in 2062.

Consider the hints: 1835. The careful construction of the phrases “also the year of Y” and “if Y were not around”. 1910. 2062. I might have done some quick arithmetic and guessed Halley’s Comet. A keen teammate might have known of Mark Twain’s remark, which I didn’t. Together, we’d have got our ten points. Maybe I’m not such a dud at quizzing after all.

I came dead last in the next one I took part in, though. Never mind.

After sitting through a few quizzes and sifting through others that quizmasters like Abhinav, Samanth, Aniket and Rajiv sent me, a quiet epiphany crept up on me. It’s about what I came to think of as the most satisfying, even the most telling thing about them.

The reason the old #kolstylz questions grew dull, after all, is not just that they are about facts filed away somewhere for all to find if they want, or not. Not just that you, trying to answer such a question, either know or don’t know the fact concerned. No, they became dull because every unthinking quizmaster who uses the fact will frame essentially the same question. How much variation can “What is the capital of Bolivia?” stand, anyway?

Try this instead: dig around the fact a bit and follow those chains of associations, make your connections and seek that dash of elegance. Do those things, and you will probably produce a question that’s yours alone. One that’s never been asked before and perhaps will never be asked again, at least not in the same form. It extinguishes itself, in Hemant Morparia’s words, though not in the same way that a #kolstylz question does, precisely because it can stand being asked in a different form. More than likely, the way it is framed and presented will reflect your particular interests.

Good quizmasters’ questions are like that. Because he has studied literature and reads widely, Abhinav relishes literary questions and often sets “lit” quizzes. His signature is a question built around a birthday or an anniversary of some kind. His BQC quiz, for example, began with the Borges/Falkland War question because that day was the 115^th birthday of the Argentinian writer. Similarly, Quizza Macabra began with the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, “who died on this date 92 years back”.

There’s the best thing about quizzes like these. They can have a definite style, because a good quizmaster has a definite style. For me, it’s one more throwback to my programming days. All the good programmers around me had their particular stylistic flourishes while writing their programmes. Perhaps these would make their code easier to understand, or more efficient, or more easily used by someone else, or simply prettier.

Call it elegance.

Call it personality, too. Quizza Macabra had this question: “In the context of this quiz, what exactly are taphophobia and taphophilia?”

I had no idea, though in retrospect the “taph-” should have been a giveaway. Abhinav’s answers were:

Taphophobia—fear of being buried alive.

Taphophilia—passion for cemeteries (loosely called tombstone tourism).