Bombay Quiz Club

We're holding a quiz on Sunday starting at 10:30 AM. The quizmasters are Ravi Venkatesh and Shamanth, so it willbe good. The early start is because one of the quizmasters needs to be elsewhere later. The venue is the YWCA in Colaba. Just get off at Regal, cross the road, walk past Cafe Royal and turn left.

Bombay Quiz Club

The stars are not in alignment thsi weekend. Therefore, the quiz scheduled on the 19th has been cancelled and rescheduled to the 26th. The quizmaster has changed as well. Ravi Venkatesh will be doing the quiz in place of Naveen Unni. Venue details will be posted later.

Peace, and Cthulhu fthagn.

Bombay Quiz Club

The next BQC quiz has been scheduled for 19th Nov, Sunday. (11.30 am)
Naveen Unni will quizmaster.
Venue : Cathedral High School, near VT station.

The Call of Cthulhu

It was while perusing the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston that I first read of the strange and sinister events that nearly unleashed forces of ravening madness upon this Earth. We live in a fragile bubble of life, warmed by the comforting hearthglow of our ignorance, in which we select the facts we wish to see. There are those who knowingly pierce that bubble, exposing themselves to the horror that no human mind can comprehend and still stay sane. Thurston talks about the merciful inability of the human mind to correlate all the contents of the world. I, who in my unthinking folly, once prided himself in his skill at drawing linkages between apparently unrelated facts, concur. If I had not seen a curious convergence between the last attempt to free Cthulhu on 1 April 1926 and the formation of the Bombay Quiz Club, 80 years later to the very day, I would not now be plagued by nightmares of clammy terror, of vast dripping Cyclopean architecture, and always, waking or asleep, the guttural incantation:

Cthulhu fthagn

I present these facts in the hope that, forewarned, no other human being accidentally falls into the clutches of the monstrous Amit Varma or the cruel Dhoomk2.

Struck by the coincidence of the day on which the BQC was founded- 1 April, 2006- with the anniversary of those terrible events experienced by poor Thurston, I blithely decided to explore this odd and intriguing society. Little did I know of the yammering insanity of alien dimensions of eldritch dread that the Bombay Quiz Club hopes to set loose upon our world, so gay and defenseless amidst infinite echoing halls of blackness and evil, like a child’s laugh in some Torquemadan dungeon.

It is with curious reluctance that I set down these feeble words, so pitifully inadequate to describe the unspeakable abomination that is the BQC League table. The rituals of the BQC are centered around the Master of Ceremonies- and thus far, it has only been a Master. Some women have been involved in these atrocious deeds, but none has, as yet, stepped up to lead the Cult. These loathsome occasions involve an endless testing to weed out the weak from the Chosen, as the Master fires complex questions at the cultists, demanding an answer that will satisfy his unappeasable lust for intricate correlations between human domains of knowledge. The dark mania of these other-humans manifests itself in shrieks and groans of dismay, convulsive twitching as they clasp their heads in rabid attempts to extract the desired linkage, shocking outbursts of violent swearing, appeals to Crom; such is the tumultuous passion with which the participants get involved, that ordinary, everyday weapons like battleaxes and halberds are deposited outside the venue, that the hideous practices may continue uninterrupted. As I witnessed this, there began to grow upon me visions of Rl’yeh, glimpsed by a luckless few, enigmatically referred to in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abu al Hazred. Above all, past the spine-chilling cacophony of roars of triumph mingled with the wailing of the defeated, throbbed an insistent question- Why? What would motivate Rajiv Rai to connect a model of Ford, a breed of goat¹, an island and an article of clothing? What spectral visions did Milo and Minderbinder seek to conjure up by linking theories of colour with Webern and a fine French painter? In an awful moment of coherence and utter illumination, I saw the execrable truth: not content to wait for the stars, in their aeons-long drift, to come into alignment, these quizzers seek to recreate the abnormal, non-Euclidean incubus that is R'lyeh in the minds of men. The strange angles, the alternate topography ne’er imagined, will become a stronger and stronger vision, a message of power that will penetrate Cthulhu’s endless sleep and resurrect It upon this earth. To the winners of the league will go the honour of being eaten first, while the rest of humanity plunges into shrieking torment for an age and an age.

Remember these names as the shreds of your sanity claw at the enveloping darkness to come, for it is they who will raise Cthulhu and end the shrill, brief history of our race:

BQC Points Table (as of Sep 29, 2006)

Amit Varma: 29.5 from 4 quizzes

Anand Sivashankar: 22 from 3

Ravi Venkatesh: 20 points from 4

The Invizible Man: 19 from 3

Rishi: 18 from 4

Sumant Srivathsan: 17 from 2.

AP Alargarsamy: 14 from 2

Aadisht Khanna: 12 from 2

Vibhendu Tiwari: 12 from 2

Arvind Krishnaswamy: 11.5 from 3

Nandan Krishnaswamy: 11.5 from 3

Rajiv Rai: 11 from 2

Amit Pandeya: 10 from 1

Milo and Minderbinder: 10 from 1

Dhoomk2: 10 from 1

Rohan Khanna: 10 from 1

Prasad Shetty: 7 from 1

Prasann: 7 from 1

Rohit: 7 from 1

Saurabh: 7 from 1

Naveen Venkarataman: 6 from 3

Pradeep Ramarathnam: 5.5 from 1

Souvik Basu: 5.5 from 1

Arjun Chatterjee: 4 from 1

Leslie Mathew: 4 from 1

Sarat Rao: 4 from 1

1. Surprisingly, not Shub Niggurath, the infernal black goat with a thousand young.

Much fun x 2

This is a report of two quizzes, one conducted by Rajiv Rai on October 8, and one by Arun Srinivas on October 29. Immense fun came in both of them, though there's not much new about that. Is there?

Rajiv's much-awaited quiz was superbly balanced and keenly contested, with all 17 participants taking part in the finals, if one may call it that, in five teams of three each and two lonely souls. Sumant Srivathsan, Anand Sivakumar and Arun Srinivas led from start to finish, eventually winning by a whopping margin of five points, 27.5 to the 22.5 of two other teams. The final results (and scores):

1] Sumant Srivathsan, Anand Sivashankar and Arun Srinivas (27.5 points)

2] Nandan Krishnaswamy, AP Alagarsamy and Souvik Basu (22.5)
2] Arvind Krishnaswamy, Pradeep Ramarathnam and Amit Varma (22.5)

4] Govind Grewal and Aadisht Khanna (20)

5] J Ramanand, Naveen Unni and Satyam (19)

6] Rishi Iyengar, Aditya Jalan and Ravi Venkatesh (17.5)

Arun's quiz on the 28th got a low turnout, perhaps because it came just after Diwali. Many who confirmed did not come, and redemption, I'm afraid, will not come easy for them. In any case, the quiz turned out to be quite a thriller, and was decided by a last-question buzzer. In brief, the results:

1] Rishi Iyengar and Amit Varma
2] Sumant Srivathsan and Naveen Unni
3] Arvind and Nandan Krishnaswamy

A post with the league standings, written by Rishi, will arrive duly.

The next BQC quiz

The next quiz of the Bombay Quiz Club will be on this Sunday[08 October]. Details below:

Venue: YWCA auditorium on Madam cama Road (next to Regal theatre, Colaba)
directions : get down at Churchgate station / VT , and take a taxi to Regal theatre.

Time: 11.30 AM.

Rajiv Rai is the quizmaster.

On an Old School Quiz (and running around naked)

Ok, the second part was just to trick the search engines, nobody ran around naked in the quiz

Apparently the convoluted directions were meant to keep out potential Darwin award winners... but after a lot of calling, querying and searching the participants managed to track down Cathedral High School.

In keeping with desire for high thinking, the room available for the quiz was on the top floor of the structure (it was a nice school although it reminded the author of priests with deep voices, and sundry punishments he had faced for various transgressions a long long time ago..)

All the effort was worth it, when we heard the answer to question 0 of elims.


Question 0 - What are the awards for the National Remodeling Industries called? or something similar - answer here

The elims started with two member teams ended with 6 4 member teams participating in the finals - comprising of the 6 top qualifiers and 2 members from the 'audience'.

Team 3(Dhoomketu, Naveen (Unni), Vibhendu, Anand) and Team 4 (Amit, Leslie, Sarat and Arjun) set the early pace, especially after cracking the theme in the connect round, with Team 1 (Rohit, Prasann, Saurabh and Ravi) playing catch up.

Naveen (V) had a brilliant crack for "Wellington radio personality Grant Kereama was treated as a hero in NZ in 2004, for something which was broadcast live, what was the funda? " The answer, he donated his kidney so that Lomu could return to the All Blacks - of course the answer was somewhat spoilt by 'someone' who added something about running around naked.

Overall a good quiz by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan and Pradeep Ramaratnam, although some of us were of the opinion that some of the trivia required for working the answers out was really arcane, but then again - you can never please everyone all the time, can you?

The quiz ended with a feast at Yoko's sizzlers. And to round it off, here is a question for you - Which one of the 2 quizmasters is slated to run around Juhu naked as a consequence of losing a bet on the famous 434 Aus SA match? (He said he would run nude on Juhu beach if SA won the match)

Watch this space for answers.


Standings at the end:

1st with 15 points: Dhoomketu, Naveen (Unni), Vibhendu, Anand
2nd with 15 points: Rohit, Prasann, Saurabh and Ravi
3rd with 14 points: Amit, Leslie, Sarat and Arjun
4th with 9 points: Sathya, Aswath, Vipul and (4th name not there)
5th with 7.5 points: Rishi, Shiju, Naveen (Venkataraman), Ashish
6th with 7 points: Arvind, Nandan, AP Alagarsamy, Satyiki

(scores courtesy Amit)

~ cross posted here

The joys of quizzing

Often when I tell people that I'm going to a quiz or just returning from one, they groan and go, "Oh no, how boring." And I feel like picking up the nearest car and plonking it down on them and screaming, "It's not boring! You're boring! Boo!"

Many people have the impression that quizzing is about how much you know, and that questions like "What is the capital of Pretoria?" or "How many Maigret books did George Simenon write?" predominate. If you know it, you're cool. If you don't, it's boring. Well, it's not like that at all.

Quizzing, the kind I enjoy, is not about knowing stuff but about working out stuff: as Dhoomketu says in his post here, about "lateral thinking" and "problem solving." A good question is framed in such a way that even if you don't know the answer, you have a chance of guessing what it is. Typically, the question itself will have some clues. And that process is great fun, especially the Eureka moment when you crack a question, or even hear the answer.

J Ramanand, the former Mastermind winner, made three great posts on it which are recommended reading if you enjoy quizzing, much of it reproducing a primer written by the genial Pune quizzer, Niranjan Pednekar. Check them out: 1, 2, 3. As an example of what I mean by a good quiz question, let me take an example from the first of those posts:

This product was originally called 'Bib label lithiated'. To rename it, six alternative names were considered. What is it called now?

Now, chances are you won't know the answer to this. (I didn't when I first heard it.) But can it be worked out? Look for clues in the question: the most important information it contains is that 'Bib label lithiated' was one of seven names considered for the product. Seven? Eureka moment: Could it be 7 UP? And indeed, that's the answer.

As Niranjan writes, consider how boring the question would have been if framed thus: "What was 7-up called initially?" No way of working that out if you don't know it.

And that's why a good quiz can be so much fun: if it contains 60 questions, that's 60 problem-solving exercises for you, often in collaboration with one or two or three other people. You also get to see the way other teams solve these problems, and even if you don't win, the intellectual stimulation it provides is worth the few hours you spend at a quiz.

While I've been doing much of my quizzing in Pune, over the last few months much activity has taken place around the Bombay Quiz Club. We have two interesting quizzes coming up (Armageddon, which I won three years ago thanks entirely to my choice of partner, and a sports/entertainment quiz), and you can see some reports of past quizzes here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If you're in Mumbai and wish to check out what it's all about, drop in at any of our forthcoming quizzes: the Bombay Quiz Blog will generally have latest details, as will our mailing list, which you're welcome to join.

I shall end this with an easy trivia question that I'm sure you will work out: Sometime in early December 2004, J Ramanand became the first person to blogroll two particular blogs. One of them was The Middle Stage. Name the other one.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.