Bengaluru: Hotbed of quiz contests in India

Earlier this week, on Wednesday night, Movin Miranda flew in from Kuala Lumpur to join his team “We Are Like This Wonly” in Bengaluru, with another teammate landing up from Hong Kong. Across town, four-time winners QED (quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “which was to be demonstrated”) have congregated from Singapore, Delhi and Chennai at Hotel Janardhan on Race Course Road, where they always stay when they come for these keenly contested duels. Other rivals have descended on the city from Mumbai, Kolkata, Thrissur in Kerala and even the UAE. All for the battle of the titans you have probably never heard of.

These men (and a few women), who represent some of the country’s finest quizzing talent, have come to Bengaluru this weekend to face off in MegaWhats, the annual national quiz conducted by the Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA), and to try their luck in the various other quizzes that are a part of the three-day annual quizzing jamboree called AsKQAnce that began on Friday.

“Everyone who takes quizzing seriously has made it to Bengaluru this weekend — this is probably the highest ranked among all the quiz festivals,” says Aryapriya Ganguly, who teaches sociology at Indian School of Business & Finance in New Delhi and has been flying down for MegaWhats for the last three years. AsKQAnce itself has been dubbed the “Woodstock of Indian quizzing” by one regular, while J Krishnamurthi, an avid quizzer from Hyderabad, calls MegaWhats “the gold standard of quizzing”.

But unlike business quizzes with attractive prizes, such as Tata Crucible or the Brand Equity Quiz which, incidentally, also began in Bengaluru in 1991, the grand prize at MegaWhats is a voucher for books worth Rs 2,000 each at Blossom, Bengaluru’s much-loved book store. The modest accolade notwithstanding, these dedicated participants make the pilgrimage, year after year.


A Mind Sport

It is tempting to take this as evidence to dub the city as the country’s top destination for what aficionados refer to as a “mind sport”. But while there may be differences of opinion on whether Chennai, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad or Delhi should rightfully lay claim to that title, there is consensus that Bengaluru has the most packed quizzing calendar in the country. “Bengaluru quizzing is much more organised while in Chennai it is more like a club activity, and we try to meet once a fortnight,” says Jayakanthan R, part of the Chennai chapter of Quiz Foundation of India and a member of QED, considered one of the most formidable quizzing teams in the country. Krishnamurthi, a former head of Google Business Solutions in India, says Bengaluru is easily the most evolved quiz city in the country. “And it is all thanks to KQA.”

KQA was founded in 1983 by member of Parliament Rajeev Gowda, the late wing commander GR Mulky, considered the moving spirit of KQA, and Jagdish Raja, the founder of Jagriti Theatre, among others. “There were a couple of quizzes by a quizmaster who had come down from Calcutta to the Bangalore Club [the oldest club in the city that counts Winston Churchill amongst its former members] and I asked myself why we couldn’t do the same — and that’s when WingCdr (Mulky) suggested we form KQA,” recalls Raja. The quizzes soon started becoming popular and, simultaneously, the frequency grew.

KQA conducts around 50 events a year, with three to four quizzes on a Sunday every month. The venue for these quizzing enthusiasts was initially Daly Memorial Hall, built in 1917 and owned by the Mythic Society. Shunted from there, they began meeting at Arakeri Auditorium at the Institution of Agricultural Technologists (IAT) on Queen’s Road, which is also the venue for AsKQAnce. These days quizzes are held at the cafeteria of a microfinance company in Koramangala, volunteered by a member, after IAT raised its rent.

The association makes an effort to foster the spirit of quizzing from a young age, beginning with a quiz for students in grade 3, called ‘Karan Arjun’. “The idea was to engage with people at different levels and make it as broad-based as possible,” says Arul Mani, a lecturer at St Joseph’s college, who has been quizzing with KQA since 1985 when he was in ninth grade.

Unlike quizzes by associations in cities such as Chennai and Hyderabad, which are mostly confined to meetings of members, KQA quizzes are open to everyone. “KQA was founded because the wing commander felt [other] quizzes tend to be restrictive,” adds Mani who, with his signature long hair, flowing beard and kurta, has come to be synonymous with KQA and quizzing in Bengaluru. He himself got hooked to KQA when, at his first quiz there, he was able to work out that Zen ( Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word ‘Chan’) is derived from “dhyana,” or meditation in Sanskrit. “It was just a guess, but I got a huge kick out of it when it turned out to be right,” he recalls. This high of being able to work out an answer is often cited by quizzers as the reason they turned into life-long addicts.

Among those who have dropped in at KQA quizzes is Nandan Nilekani, Infosys cofounder and former chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India, a keen quizzer. For one “father and son” quiz, Mani recalls, he teamed up with historian Ramchandra Guha and both their sons, and ended up coming a respectable third. While Nilekani may now be restricting himself to his weekly Friday quiz on Twitter, Infosys employees continue to be regular participants. But those who turn up for KQA quizzes are not just “techies” or “geeks”, aver members. “There is no quizzing stereotype — if you feel Mani may fit into the mould as a left-leaning, kurta-wearing academic, his teammate, Mitesh Agarwal, is the diametric opposite, as the chief technology officer of Oracle,” says Thejaswi Udupa, a KQA regular who also conducts quizzes.

Quizzing in each city is a microcosm of its culture, he adds. Thus the popular notion is that Chennai and Kolkata are ultra-competitive while Mumbai tends to be bothered about the amount of prize money involved. And Bengaluru, like everything else about the city, is laidback. “Benglaluru quizzers are not as cut-throat — they are unassumingly excellent,” is how Ganguly, originally from Kolkata and now part of the capital’s quizzing circuit, puts it.

When Peter is Repeater

Like any self-respecting subculture, quizzing here also has its own jargon. Conversations among enthusiasts throw up terms like TCQ, or “a typical Chennai question”, defined as questions on people who have died recently, apparently a regrettable predilection in that city. “Peter” is no cult figure you are ignorant of but short for “repeater,” or a question that is being repeated — anathema to some purists. And taking a dig at Kolkata, the notion that quizzing in India originated with a quiz there in the 1960s by Neil O’Brien has been dubbed “Creationism” in a dictionary of Bengaluru quizzing terminology (because it “suffers from the same circular logic problem as the account of Creation in the Bible”). This is not to say that quizzing in the city is confined to associations whose abbreviated titles make them seem venerable.

There are pub quizzes like the one at Vapor microbrewery every Tuesday, dubbed “Cluesday,” and informal gatherings of friends who gather for the sole purpose of quizzing, at times with a drink or four. There are even those who have decided to combine their passion with business, and launched quizzing startups (See It’s not Just a Game).

Missing She Power

The one group that seems to be inadequately represented in KQA and in the city’s quizzing scene is women despite, as has been pointed out, women having won BBC’s popular Mastermind India thrice. This is also highlighted in “Furiously Curious”, the 2014 documentary about the quizzing subculture in India by Sarat Talluri Rao, which follows a team from Mumbai to the finals of the Landmark quiz in Chennai. In scene after scene of the film, one can see that the gatherings are overwhelmingly of men.

“I cannot hold KQA responsible for the paucity of female quizzers... It is a pan-India problem and one of this generation,” says Jayashree Mohanka over email from Kolkata. Mohanka, who has topped KQA’s national quiz for soloists, recalls that when she was in school and college in Chennai there were plenty of “formidable female quizzers” and cannot quite fathom why they may have dropped off the radar now. She also dispels the argument that there might be a “locker room” culture or an uncomfortable environment that puts women off, though this has been mentioned by some women.