Call of the wild

The BCQC had its origins in the early 90s, when a group of COEP students began quizzing at the Boat Club of COEP every Saturday.

It was meant to be an informal way to indulge in a pursuit that very few take to, like Jesus fish to water (or Dharmendra to whiskey). Somehow, each year, there were just about enough people to keep it going, and along the way, the caravan only became larger (hello Monica!).

Spurred by that, the motley group picked up a confusing acronymic-name, grew beyond COEP to a pan-Puneri nature, and picked up a unique and authentic character of its own.

All this was made possible by a large group of quizzers who gave their time, interest, effort, and their eccentricities in order to help the BCQC sustain these 2+ decades. All without expecting anything in return, except to ensure there was always a platform for those who wanted to quiz. For all its warts, moles, and freckles, this has been a reasonable success.

Each year, old BC quizzers leave: some graduate (finally! and usually with distinction), some escape torturous jobs to find new roles (like with the Spanish inquisition), and some simply have had enough of long visual connects. Like in any ecosystem, the BCQC also needs fresh legs, fresh ideas, and fresh meat to move ahead.

Old BC fossils will have noticed the relative lack of regular BC activity in recent times. This post is a call at large for people who can help change that.

We're looking for people (especially student quizzers) who can take on the following roles for the BC:

1. Be Quizzing impresarios: schedule open quizzes regularly, get the venues booked, arrange for prizes, do basic publicity

2. BC Session coordinators: schedule BC sessions

3. Take the anti out of our social media: update our blog/FB/email group/twitter with announcements & reports of quizzes

All of these activities demand almost no strenuous activity, only loads of quizzing enthusiasm. The returns are likely to be a warm & fuzzy glow in your heart before you go to sleep each night, proximity to some of the most devious minds in the city, and perhaps, if you're that cold-hearted, a line or three in your CV to impress an FMCG recruiter or two hundred (they move fast).

And best of all, you'll have the satisfaction of contributing to a remarkable group and keeping it going into its 3rd decade.

Interested? Write in to Suraj Menon/Avaneendra Bhargav/me/leave a comment. We'll help you with getting started.

Thanks.

[Appendix]
A History of the BCQC, according to many historians.

And with apologies to Suraj, Lord Kitchener.

A cricketing theory of Indian quiz groups

The great thing about analogies is that they seldom have to make sense. Often, the seed of such an exercise is in misplaced induction: you start with one element that coincides with another, and then you construct, induction step after step, a cathedral of pure imagination. Here is one such anal-logie, an attempt to equate Indian quizzing groups with Test cricketing nations.

Pune: this is where it began. One day, I realised that New Zealand cricket had much in common with us (the BCQC). In the quizzing map of India, we are a small but committed quizzing city. We tend to suffer from a very tiny pool of quizzers, but don't let that affect our creativity. We tend to be garrulous about our quizzing opinions, but are usually easy-going (and no one really pays much attention to us :-) ). Yes, we are (were?) a cold city; some of our quizzing happens outdoors and in picturesque settings (at least when we had the Dewang Mehta auditorium!). It can also be argued that the BC is a multi-purpose arena, where quizzing has to contend with other sports. And we have had reasonably good individual success at national events.

From now, everything is, as I put it, "illegitimate shoehorning":

Kolkata: This veteran quizzing city is the Olde English Test team. History records it as fostering quizzing in the country. The style is old-fashioned, and the rest of India seems to practice a different form these days.

Bombay: These guys are the New English Test team. Largely made up of talented expats (from South Africa? see below). Competitive like crazy. Have won some big quizzes recently.

Bangalore: My vote goes to Australia as their isomorphic peer. Why? The KQA sets the standard when it comes to quizzes, formats, and quizzers. Perhaps the Australian Test team of a few years ago ;-)

Chennai: Should they be Australia? Or should they be South Africa. I hope no one tries to "choke" me for this. Maybe they are Victoria and New South Wales; two sides of the same Face/Off coin.

Goa: The guys at the SEQC will throw theirs stereos at being typed as the Windies; both have great locations to quiz, drink, and relax, but certainly do some great quizzing. Makes me think: why take quizzing (and such analogies) all that seriously?

There are many more quiz clubs and cricketing nations; scope for more mad connections. Are the guys in Delhi the Pakistanis (unpredictable "Northies" with flair; not ageless, I hope)? And what about the Sri Lankans and the Zimbabweans?

And who are the India of quizzing? (or are we all?) Is it time to ask the Belgians?

Written as a companion piece to this video, recorded by Sarat Rao, who is making a documentary on Indian quizzing (shot on the sidelines of the last BCQC Open)

Pounce and Bounce

A guest post by old BC alumnus Hirak Parikh, who now quizzes in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The original appeared on his blog here.

A veteran quizzer once told me that quizzing was not so much about knowing stuff, but was more about entertainment and having fun. I disagreed at that point thinking that such a remark was an act of high treason. Over the years, I have realised that quizzing is not a knowledge test. If it were so then quizzes would be like exams - timed and written. A written and timed test is the fairest way to judge who knows the most. All teams get the same questions, no question of order or luck. The team/person that got the highest number of correct answers would walk home with the prize. That's not the point, is it? The point is to have fun.

Over the years, people have obsessed over the best format that minimizes luck and ensures that the team that knows the most (read: best) wins. Quizzing innovations is an activity which has almost become a kind of cottage industry among quizzers with time on their hands. I am about to add more to that body of literature. That being said IMHO, my experience suggests that there is no point looking for the Holy Grail of a perfect format. A good quiz depends on ensuring three simple things in order of importance:

a) The format should be the 'modified infinite bounds with a midway reversal'. All questions have equal points, the next question to the team to the left/right of the team that answered it. If the question is unanswered then the original teams gets the next question. Order reverses halfway during the quiz.

b) A long quiz.
I think for 5-6 teams there should be at least >40 questions. A factor of 10 is ideal. Even the old system of rounds with pass-direct questions (full points for direct, and half for a pass question) would be okay provided the quiz was long enough. c) Questions, questions, questions.
The greatest evil is not the format, or the order, or marking scheme -- but bad questions. If questions are set correctly, spread over different topics evenly, and are of similar difficulty then the quiz will be fair and the best team 'should' win.

In practice, luck and order does play somewhat of a role even in the modified infinite bounds format, though b) should take care of it to some extent. The critical issue is to normalize questions in some fashion. Why normalize? Each quizmaster (QM) has his/her own personal strength (read: fetish) and quizzes as a result tend towards personal idiosyncrasies. The good QM is diligent about this and goes about setting questions keeping in mind those biases (knowing the QM and his/her strengths can help you work out the answer, cause you can guess what he/she knows, and how he/she sets questions). One way to do it, as is usually done for big quizzes, is to have two or more question-setters with divergent interests.

Despite the best intentions of the QM(s): all questions are not equal, some are more equal than others. A QM may think that a question is reasonably difficult, but may turn out to be a sitter. On the other hand, some questions are way too tough and end up being unanswered. Personally, if more than 10-15% of questions end up this way then the QM did a bad job. You cannot go about an weigh each question for difficulty.

The other aspect is that there should be some drama, some element of excitement in a quiz. I am a fan of 'buzzer-rounds' which have fallen out of favour in recent times. It provided that adrenalin-rush and rewarded quick recall and reflexes which are sadly missing from the current slow-cooking style. The current trend is away from the fireworks and some quizzes have written components at the start. This is bad, bad, bad.

Long story short. I tried out two innovations at the quizclub. Each team was given two wildcards to allow them to Pounce or Bounce a question.

Pounce: You can attempt a question out of turn. The team has to write down the question or tell the quizmaster before the question is attempted by any of the other teams in regular fashion. There are no negatives and a correct answer get full points.

Bounce: You can bounce a question to the team of your choice. If team doesn't answer it correctly they get -(full points), and if they do answer it correctly they get the full points. Regardless of the outcome, the team bouncing gets the next question.

The rationale behind the Pounce rule was to ensure that sitters can attempted by all. In the past, with great difficulty I have resisted urges to destroy the chair I was sitting on, or strangling the person who smirks when handed a sitter as a direct while I was left wringing my hands in despair. Often, close quizzes are decided on the basis of which team got slightly easier questions. This is where the Pounce comes in. Jump in on question out-of-queue. Grab a sitter. Of course, a team can misjudge the opponents knowledge and would end up with the question in the regular course of events.

The rationale behind the Bounce rule is to induce some excitement and additionally serves as a handicap for the obviously better team(s). There are always going to be a few questions that seem so unreasonable and tough that no one can answer them and a weaker team can either direct it towards the strongest team, or to their closest rival to level the playing field. Of course, if a team is really good and they can actually answer the question that seemed 'too tough' then all the better for them.

Innovations in practice:
This weekend when I tried these out and found the results mixed. No one team used the Bounce rule. They all played too nice, perhaps fearing retribution. The Pounce rule was used by all teams to good effect. Only once out of six times did a team not answer the question correctly. In all six cases, the team would not have got the question in the regular order and judged the moment of 'pouncing' correctly.

This was the casual Saturday quiz and not the best testing ground when there were only three teams and no one was too worried about winning or losing as there was nothing at stake. I curious to see how this works out in a longer, larger quiz more at stake. These rules do favour teams that can fake emotions of knowing or not knowing answers depending on the situation. A tight quiz can almost be like a poker game.
You can sometimes work out the answer being seeing who knows it.

Why we don't do questions on this blog

A quiz blog that doesn't purvey questions may seem like the story in a Monica Bellucci film: unnecessary. But then quizzing isn't all about the questions, or so we think. There are a number of (good) blogs that provide a regular dose of questions for trivia-vores, but we are not like them. This wasn't a conscious choice to differentiate ourselves from the rest, but truly a reflection of those who run this blog. A few reasons:
1. With Occam's razor held to our throat, we may confess that the simplest reason is laziness. Typing out questions and posting them regularly demands effort, attention, and diligence, which are qualities that automatically disqualify us.
2. We are quizzing geeks and prefer little else to making inane chatter on the peculiar sub-culture of quizzing. Most of this has had a negative contribution to the intellectual progress of mankind, but we're too busy to notice.
3. We are perhaps the first, and (almost) uniquely so, to take our post-quiz tête-à-têtes online. You will see feverish discussions, nay reviews, about quizzes we attend. We think this helps our understanding of this sport that we enjoy so much.
4. A quiz is not a mere summation of its questions, but something that is a mix of the quiz-setter's choices and compositional skills, a function of its teams' abilities and personalities, and the context of its setting. You can't quite tell how a quiz was, just from its questions. As if it is possible to reconstruct an innings by a sequence of runs scored. A quiz is a complex creature, and no quizzer's experience of it is similar to another's. This may sound an overdone examination of a simple hobby, but then you don't have to buy into this.
5. Given our size and history, we have been inclined towards experimentation in formats, presentation, and questions, as well as possessing an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm in writing about views about our infatuation with the sport. Which is why there are essays on formats, on setting quizzes, on analyses, and dil-dehlaadene-waalaa angst.
This post came about because I saw a comment on an earlier post impatiently asking for questions to that quiz. Sorry, you're quite unlikely to get a list of questions for your favourite < insert high paying quiz name> quiz here. You will have better chances elsewhere. So why bother reading this blog? We didn't say you had to bother. Even some of us don't.

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 1

It may be a tad conceited to write about the making of a quiz, but since this was the hardest quiz that I have ever set, I thought it would be interesting to write about the lessons learnt and decisions taken along the way.

The genesis of this quiz was in a bad cricket quiz that I participated in with Harish and others earlier this year. I hadn't been to a good cricket quiz in a long time and felt it was a pity this was such a bad quiz that taught me nothing new or interesting. I had the idea of a "Religions of India" quiz, about cricket, films, and politics. I had never participated in a formal quiz about Indian politics. The closest was a lovely BC quiz by Ganesh Hegde (always the quizzer, never the dancer). I pitched the idea to Harish, but soon, I had begun to form some strange ideas about the format. I requested him to let me go ahead with this alone.

I was wary of doing it alone because I did not (still don't) know a lot about Indian cricket. I had a reasonable interest in politics, but only of the last two decades. Hindi films was much easier (or so I thought). In the end, I estimate it took me about 100 days worth of reading, thinking, and setting to come up with the quiz. I have always been over-enthusiastic about setting quizzes, perhaps to the point of obsession. I spent a great deal of time coming up with my last BC open quiz last November. I guess I like the creative elements of the setting: the anxieties of not having quiz-worthy content, poring over formats and presentations, composing the written parts of the question to be both devious and subtle, and so on.

This time, I had decided not to simply dip my toes into subjects (as sometimes happens in general quiz-settings). Rather, I would try and dive deep by reading as many original sources as possible in the three topics. Setting general quizzes is easier because I collect little nuggets of possibilities each day, from just keeping my eyes and ears open. Come general quiz time, I always have something to begin from. In this case, I was starting with the tank on empty.

My last BC open quiz was hugely complicated - each of the 42 questions seemed to be made up of 2-3 sub-questions. In addition, my experiments with the elims format, a semi-final for the draft picks, elims scoring etc. seemed to make matters worse. I labeled it the "No Smoking" quiz, in reference to the then released Anurag Kashyap film of seemingly equal complexity! I had not intended it to be so much of an indulgent trip, and it provoked some soul-searching. Using the feedback from that quiz and other experiences, I decided the following:

1. Content: keep it as simple as possible, especially since the themes are off-beat. Will stick to post-Independence India.
2. Format: continue to experiment

Content
As a quizzer, each year, I'm astonished at how much we don't know. As a quiz-setter, I'm astonished to discover newer quiz-worthy things to ask. If we ever feel that we've run out of questions, then we're just not looking hard enough. I hoped to convey this very feeling to anyone who came to this quiz wondering what could be asked in these three topics.

I did not want to refer to any specialist quiz books for inspiration. The only option was to read and to do so in copious amounts. I had about three-four months left for my quiz, so I began with the topic I was most ignorant of: Politics.

Long before I planned my quiz, I had bought Ramchandra Guha's India after Gandhi. It is a bit of a tome, but it told me a lot about post-Independence India. Definitely recommended for everyone, especially since we have very few books about 1947 and later. I also read a book about Kashmir Frontline Kashmir by a former BBC correspondent and Cutouts, Caste, and Cine-Stars (by Vasanthi), which is about TN politics. I re-read parts of Vaibhav Purandare's book about the Shiv Sena. Using some hooks from these books, I read a lot of articles online. I had a little bit of a 'quota system' in order to represent both different eras as well as regions, so based on what I already knew, I looked up articles about specific people and groups.

I've come to realise that even the good cricket quizzers don't seem to know a great deal about Indian cricket. Admittedly, it is a very niche topic and potentially, a dry one. Hence, I chose to primarily go for interesting anecdotes rather than stats. A failing of sports quizzes is that they become too personality or stat-oriented. I tried to avoid these. Despite that, 7 of the 8 elims questions on cricket were answered by cricketer's names! I let that be because most of these questions were largely about anecdotes.

BTW, I also did some reading about cricket. Some sources for these: Spin and Other Turns (R. Guha once again), Sandeep Bamzai's book on Bombay cricket, books by Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar's biography (Purandare again), Indian cricket controversies - a bitchy book that I found via Google Books, and of course, the dependable Cricinfo archives.

Thankfully, teams on stage could grapple with questions on both politics and cricket.

Hindi films, something that I'm interested in, turned out to be very slippery at the end. I had left it for late, since I thought I had enough resources and jottings to see me through. I was mistaken. I wanted to ask mainstream Bollywood, so few or no questions on parallel cinema (which has been an easier quizzing fount). I looked at some of the books I owned on this topic, looked at my notes from the Encylopaedia of Indian Cinema, foraged around online, and in the end, just thought of films I owned or had seen. I wanted to have a fairly high percentage of A/V (a first for me, since I am never confident that the supporting audio/visual technology at the quizzing venue will hold up). In the end, I just about made the minimum cut.

This is already a big post, so jottings on the format in a following article.

Quizzing 101

This is college quizzing season. Which means a lot of people will be setting quizzes for their college fests. It also means that a lot of people will be setting and QMing their first quizzes. This is by far one of the most important experiences for quizzers.

However, it takes experience to grasp the nuances of setting, organising and making questions for a successful quiz. It's not difficult or anything, its just that you need to fall and fail to realise what went wrong.

The good thing is, a few stalwarts at the BCQC have already done some excellent writing on the issue of a) making good quiz questions and b)organising a quiz event.

You can find these essays here on our website. This Quizmaster's Checklist is a must-read especially if you are organising a quiz event.

(cross-posted on my personal blog)

A Few Tips More

Rounding off the guidelines:

* Setting Audio/Video questions: All too often, we see quizzes where there are mandatory audio-visual rounds and the questions may be set thus: A pic(song) is shown(played). After some brain-racking, the participants come up with their guesses. Then the quiz master goes on to reveal the pic/song and the real question is indirectly connected to the pic/song. The problem with this is the pic/song isn't central to the question. The q may well have been asked without the pic/song without diluting its focus. So when setting a audio-visual qn, ask yourself whether the qn could have been reframed without the pic/song & still have all necessary clues/focus to it. If yes, chuck the pic/audio. You don't "need" to have an A/V question in the quiz. Any deviations from plain text need to make significant contributions to the question.

* While conducting a quiz, try & do away with time limits to answers. Working out requires time, give that to your participants. I guess, after taking the effort to make the qns, u do want to provide all conditions for the qns to be attempted in the best possible manner. One can be a good judge of time, a wayward answer can be dismissed fast & a answer that is being worked out correctly can be given the time to proceed. Working out answers is sometimes like tugging at the loose thread in a sweater. A decent yank & the whole thing unravels magically. That's mostly the kick in answering such qns.

*Setting qns is also a matter of fairness. Niranjan mentioned this in context of covering as many fields as possible. This gives everyone in the quiz a decent spread of qns to answer. Some qns will be cracked only by the domain experts. But many should be able to atleast take a decent guess at most qns. Fairness also applies to the amount of hints one hides in the qn. This is a judgement call to be made by the setter: Too many clues make the qn easy, too less & u lose workability, Also lesser the clues & the domain expert is happy (no one but her/him will be able to answer the qn). Make the q such that the lay quizzer will be have a decent chance against the expert in that field. Niranjan made a bar graph of question areas couple of yrs back at Mensa to note the spread of fields. Analysis like this gives one perspective on the quiz.

*Try & set many quizzes, small & large.

*Use the quizzing books, sites to help u set qns. Don't pinch qns, reuse them. There is a difference in plagiarism & inspiration. The trivia from such resources can be used to set connect qns et al. At least reframe. It's pretty humiliating when the other quizzers find out (& generally they do) the "dhaap"-ed qns.

*Pay attention to how others frame qs in their quizzes. Ask for & take home a copy of the qns from a quiz. Most decent quizzes are happy to give u a sheet. Don't mug the answers, read the qns & think about the framing.

And slightly digressing:

*Go to a quiz for the qns & not only for the moolah.

* If u don't make it thru to the finals, stay on to watch them. You still learn a lot this way.

* Quizzing & setting are pretty much artistic endeavours. One doesn't get it right at the first shot. Plug away at it constantly. Don't approach it very academically.

* Quizzing is also about pocketing little pieces of info in some recess of your mind. You may have to use it not in the next quiz or the one after it, but some day deep into the future. Try & make sure you don't pull a "Karna" then by forgetting it :-)

* Once u start putting a tag of quality on ur qns, u'll find that its difficult to compromise on even 1 qn.

* When u find the same trivia cropping up, try & use connects to reuse well-known trivia.

* Pay attention to standard trivia, these like "singles" in cricket are an easy source of points. They are also useful in setting qns. A qn leading to standard trivia, but which is cleverly framed in a novel fashion, will draw applause from the experienced quizzers.

* Asking questions is like reciting "shair-o-shairi". The spontaneous "Wah-Wah" that a good work of art receives is all the encouragement & pat-on-the-back that u will need & enjoy.

Continuing Niranjan's Primer on organizing a good quiz - "Setting a Quiz"

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1. Go for infinite rebounds rather that direct-and-passed questions method. it is a great way to eliminate the inconsistencies caused by the d&p method.

2. Do not comment a lot on the content of the answer (other than witty remarks, of course), as it provides unfair hints to others.

3. Never provide hints in the middle of a round. it is unfair to the earlier teams.

4. Keep spare questions handy in case of a tie. use the same questions (preferrably best of three) for all the teams involved in a tie.

5. Do not assume a stiff posture in contesting an argument by a participant/audience. settle the issue quickly, either by an (assumed) authoritative gesture or by a corrective action such as cancelling the question. (authority is generally mistaken for rudeness, which is not among the best interpretations of the word).

6 This one is a recent addition. many times, it so happens that due care is not taken by the quizmaster in using his/her discretion when it comes to accepting an answer or crediting team(s) with partial points. I myself have been guilty of causing such scoring discrepancies and also of objecting to such discrepancies in the middle of a quiz. the quizmaster, most of the times, is trying to be fair, but may not succeed every time, unless he/she is well prepared. probably, it is best to formulate a strategy for each individual question and decide a priori on the acceptable contents of an answer and respective scoring. i myself have not adopted such a strategy upto this point, but would certainly be practicing it the next time I get an opportunity to set a quiz.

6. According to me, quizzing is an intellectually satisfying activity, the prime purpose of which is to have fun, and NOT to make money, get recognition, satisfy egos, taunt other participants and so on. so, it is better to leave our egos at a suitable place and not let them interfere in these 'trivial' pursuits, especially in a live quiz. newsgroups always come in handy for all flaming and 'impolity'..;-))

7. At the end of the quiz, you have every right to be pleased /displeased to hear the comments of the participants /audience, to ponder over why little went right and so much went wrong. but the feeling that stands out, is that of intellectual satisfaction that you derived out of the whole activity.

8. After setting a quiz, cast a retrospective glance on the quiz. treat all the constructive criticism - by yourself and by others - with respect, try to incorporate what you can in the next quiz. use your own discretion in separating the comments to be incorporated from the comments to be ignored. after all the quizmaster's decision is final! and it would be helpful to remember what ghalib said: 'ghalib, buraa na maan, agar vaaiz (preachers) buraa kahen duniyaa mein koii hai, jise achchhaa kahe sabhii???'

I refuse to claim that these are decrees or even guidelines. these are merely some experiences that I had the fortune of sharing with you.

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This had to be one among the opening posts of this blog - this text, put together by Niranjan is a compendium of what some of us have considered the best ways of creating good questions. It also describes the driving spirit behind the BC style and offers a glimpse into its philosophy. (The lawn quizzes apart from being a crucible for experimentation helped hone and perfect these ideas). It is also my personal tribute to the best quizzes I've ever participated - the four Mensa quizzes from 1998 to 2001.

This appeared originally on the Inquizitive egroup on 15 Feb 2001 and a redux version appeared later that year on 29 Oct. BC Alumni will have great fun re-relishing these words.

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How to set a quiz or sweet scorn soup for the quizzical soul

My qualified abilities may restrict me from making me qualified to provide advice. Furthermore, being a consultant, I cannot stand the thought of advising without being paid. so, all I can do is to share my trivial experiences in setting (as in preparing, not as in 'fixing' - since we have seen some examples of 'setting' quizzes that way) quizzes.

Following are the things i say to myself standing in front of a mirror <excluding 'aainaa hamen dekh ke hairaan saa kyuun hai?', if you have seen the film 'gaman'>, while doing the following:

SETTING QUESTIONS

1. Never ever refer to a quiz book, a quizzing site, past quizzes and so on for finding questions (I have become wiser following my own experiences in this regard). the quizzers, these days, are a busy lot. They keep on scanning the net day in and day out to look for readymade questions. Some of them have been reported to cite the site, the quiz number and the question number just based on olfactory stimulus emanating from your mouth, even before you begin asking a question. the only way to counter such organisms is to devise your own questions.

2. Look for abstraction. look for commonalities in facts. try lateral thinking to link different things together. Think about the commonest things that you know, and try to explore the dark, unknown territory that surrounds the facts.

e.g. Please refer to this question:

"Make a small cross of two light strips of Cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross, so you have the body of a ____." What is the significance?

If you visualize the objects mentioned in the question, you may think about a kite. That may lead you to Benjamin Franklin's famous lightening experiment. And that is the answer. The question is derived from the well-known experiment, but little is known about the background of the experiment or tinier details such as Benjamin Franklin's own description of the experiment. There you have a possible question before you, standing in the dark, enticingly inviting you to explore more about it. You hack the net (or a library!) in and out, till you get to something like above and derive the satisfaction of having set a decent question.

A triangle and a square, a flowering reed and a noose, a lion and two vultures, a hand and a mouth. What do these constitute together?

Pure lateral thinking. These are the picture alphabets used to spell Cleopatra's name on the Rosetta Stone.

3. Use old trivia only as building blocks. Hack the surrounding knowledge space to construct new trivia.

'I don't especially like it, at least not raw. And second, I found it impossible to chew, swallow, and be ready for the next stuff. We tried substituting other vegetables, including apples and celery, but with unsatisfactory results. The solution was to stop in between so that I could spit it out into a wastebasket and then proceed.' An explanation that dispels a myth. What?

Most of us who have been visiting the boat club lawns on saturdays for a considerable amount of time must be remembering a very likable question which went like:

Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots. What is he famous for? Well, he was the voice of Bugs Bunny! That is a question which has been repeated here for n number of times, n being a very large number, rivalled only by a googol. But, this itself forms a good foundation for a new question. So, one searches the net for Mel Blanc and finds about his career, likes, dislikes and stumbles upon a gem of a fact that blanc himself has recorded in his autobigraphy, about the origin of the myth of he being allergic to carrots.

4. General knowledge, to some, is about how much you know and how much you can reproduce (no, not that way). Isn't such one-question-to-one-answer task a mechanical activity? According to me, the amusing part of the whole deal lies not in 'knowing' and 'reproducing' the answer, but in 'locating' it.

Keeping this in mind, an important guideline can be stated as - make the questions:

a) Workable - there should be a hint regarding the answer hidden in the question (which, of course, should not make the answer obvious). If half the answer lies buried in the heap of the question, the fun on the part of the quizzer lies in detecting the first half from the question and finding a complementing fact to complete the puzzle.

e.g. Centigram (formerly Speech-Plus Inc.) is working on the British version of its program 'Prose-2000'. What has been one of the chief motivations?

What are the hints? Computer software, speech, british. these are enough for some members of the new generation of cunning quizzers to surmise that the question is regarding the software that was built to enable the great stephan hawking to communicate. In fact, he said about the current system: 'the only problem with it is that it gives me an American accent!'

Another one. What is so significant about Zyclon-B, a commercial pesticide patented by IG Farben (a DuPont subsidiary) as a remedy on typhus-bearing lice? Typhus is a disease that appears when people live together for long periods without bathing. It is carried by lice that infest hair and clothes.

Hints are in the statement about many people living together for long periods. The name Farben is distinctly german (if not gujarati..;-) that may lead one to concentration camps, but Zyclon being a pesticide may even lead a few enlightened (at that time) brains to discovering the fact that it was the gassing agent used by the nazis to exterminate jews in the notorious gas-chambers.

b) Inverted - 'who did ...' with the 'who' being a relatively unknown variable, does not guarantee amusement. The '...' deed of the 'who', which, hopefully, is a much more known fact, should be a part of the answer. In a nutshell, keep the answer easy and well-known and the question relatively obscure, so that, on missing such an answer, one feels like hanging oneself to death by a suitable stringlike object available nearby. (Avoid keeping such objects in the vicinity, if you want to miss the fun part.)

e.g. Mehrab Hussain Opee c Khaled Masud b Saifulla Khan 21;
February 20, 1998. What was peculiar to this?

This question could also be framed as 'how did Raman Lamba die?' but then that takes out the whole punch of the sad but true fact. Instead it could be framed as above, with reference to the date, the players (with distinctly Bangladeshi names)

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

Seven names up, so it was called 7-up. 'what was 7-up called initially?' would not qualify as an exciting question to any sane quizzer.

c) Interesting - you cannot have a quiz without participants and would certainly prefer to have an audience. So make each and every question interesting to involve the audience. Even if the scores indicate a massacre of sorts, the audience should still feel that they should have been sitting in place of the participants, rather than stretching their faces and concealing their yawns (they are not so polite, believe me.)

e.g. 5 petals, 3 petals, 4 petals, a pipal leaf. Justify the series.

Makes one think about the question. Requires a lot of lateral thinking with some factual knowledge to come up with the answer that these are the shapes of the awards PADMA SHRI, PADMABHUSHAN, PADMAVIBHUSHAN,BHARAT RATNA. Most won't get it, but they would be happy to have come across an interesting fact.

d) Truthful - as much as possible, let there be some element of truth in the fact that resides in the question. verify each and every question from 2-3 sources (and hopefully, not Sandhyanand).

5. Conducting a quiz is not about posing difficult questions. One is better off not assuming a posture of a sadistic exterminator, who is as elated at the sight of helpless victims suffocating under the virulent cloud of incomprehensible esoteria. At the worst, it could be a rollercoaster ride, where everyone knows that the scare is not going to last long.

6. There is no excuse to a failed question, if you wish to really feel good about your own quiz. To a real quizzer who sets questions, a question is not a formality, it is a part of himself. it is his/her own representation on paper. So, if you have a hundred questions in a quiz, let at least 90 satisfy the above criteria.

7. Try to cover as many fields as possible. This may not be possible, if you lack the manpower to cover all the fields, but try to be as generic as possible.

8. A very good way of setting interesting and cryptic questions is setting 'connect' questions. This is one sure-shot way of combining different fields and letting the quizzers engage in some lateral thinking. It is extremely satisfying on part of a quizzer to crack such a question, since it, many a time, ends up being the high point of a quiz rather than the final victory.

Some examples:

What's common to Winemaking, Tailoring and Wife-beating? ;-)

The term 'Thumb rule' originates from these. Temperature measurement in a barrel for winemaking, a unit of proportions for tailoring, and 'If a stick is used, it should not be thicker than the man's thumb.' with respect to wife-beating..;-)

What is common to Shammi kapoor, Oracle and Gulliver's Travels?

Yahoo! (junglee, Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, tribe from gulliver's travels)

What is common to the following quotes?
A) "Well, gentlemen, you are about to see a baked Appel."
B) "How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? French fries."
C) "I'd rather be fishing."

Last words before execution on electric chair by George Appel, James French, Jimmy Glass respectively.

A visual one. A painting of sigmund freud in brown and the famous shower scream scene from hitchcock's psycho. connect.

Uses the well known trivia that the blood used in the scene was in fact chocolate syrup, the movie being black and white. in fact, the painting is made by using the same brand of 'bosco' chocolate syrup. incidently, it happens to be of Freud.

This was very much related to the then current affairs.

Connect the following: Padosan, McDonald's, Breathless, Watson, Kansas City / Red Indians. bhola (sunil dutt from padosan), burger, shankar (mahadevan), doctor (watson) and chief (of a red indian tribe). These were the nicknames of the hijackers of the IC 814, a very current event at the time of the quiz.

Many of us have generated a good amount of connects on the bc lawns and have witnessed some memorable connects during Chakravyuuh, BCJ and Mensa quizzes. Thanks to Chakravyuuh for coining the original terms 'radial', 'cascading' and 'meshed' connects.

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Next week: Niranjan on CONDUCTING A QUIZ