Author: akshay

Quizzing
8 hours of questions and answers (and excellent guesses) with my partner – Shruti parimoo
General Quiz #1: At NIE, Mysore. We reached about an hour early and talked about neuroplasticity, and the like. Then, the first round started. There were about 14 teams and about 24 questions. Some of them:

What does the following cartoon represent? (Of course it wasn’t this easy in the actual event)

Whose old logo is this?

Cricket question.
“I would say the difference between the two side is the fielding. England
are an all-round good fielding side. I do believe that India have
few…3 or 4 very good fielders and … X”
Fill X.

Which phrase in English owes its origin to the fact that density of water at 0 degree Celsius is 0.93 g/cu cm and that of water at 4 degree Celsius is 1 g/cu cm?

And, we didn’t get selected for the second round.
But we watched it along with very active others.

Dry round – a lot of questions based on “pounce and bounce” format (That is, after the question is read out, every team has a chance to write the answer and “pounce” on it, getting +10 for correct and -5 for wrong; and then teams who haven’t pounced will get the questions in infinite bounce format)
List it – to list all the 13 individual olympic medal winners of India, all the 9 movies of Ranbir Kapoor, and all the Shiva temples based on 5 elements.
Short Visual Connect – A set of images on the screen, find what connects them.
Long Visual Connect – A long set of images coming one by one, find what connects them at the earliest. This one was about Raghu Ram

Having been only to quizzes where the quizmaster rein and the participants open their mouth only to answer or “pass” this first quiz in two years was mind-blowing, not blowing, mind-expanding for me. I’d never thought quizzes could be fun too (and not just exciting)

And then General Quiz #2 at SJCE Mysore
Here’s where I got really surprised. Not just that all the teams who participated in the previous quiz was here, one of the QMs at the previous quiz was a participant, and one of the participants there was the QM here.
For now, this is the longest (5 hours) and the most interesting (unlimited fun) quiz I’ve ever been to.

Questions have all been uploaded to slideshare here.
The preliminary round was much easier (in terms of the number of questions we could answer). My personal favourite would be:

What is this? 😀 (See how the big circles are linked)

And all the 9 teams participated in the second round (which turned out to be a wise decision, because the teams left out would have to watch from outside the rest of the quiz)
In the second part, I started with a -5 for pouncing. I said “simple majority” where it should have been “The common parlance for the minimum number of members of a deliberative assembly (a body that uses parliamentary procedure, such as a legislature) necessary to conduct the business of that group and its requirement is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of persons”

And a lot of questions later, including one that looked very similar to this tricky graph question I found from Quora, the Sheldon Cooper round started.
We had to give the Latin phrases for the descriptions. And Shruti absolutely rocked.
So did she in the round about books, and also the Southpark round.
The LVC about Cricket stumped us, but those about buildings were easily solvable.

And then it was late night, they had already began singing songs at Jayciana outside. So it was time to find out the winner, and as there was a tie between KP‘s team and the other awesome team. It couldn’t be resolved even after a few questions, so everyone left in a jovial mood.

But here is a way to conduct quizzes that I’ve never experienced before. Find excellent questions. Pose them. And let everyone have fun. Get up from the seat. Argue with the QM. Argue with other teams. Go touch the projected image, just to see if the texture gives any clue. Look for clues in all the words spoken by each member in the hall. And successfully spend a lot of time into something that’s well worth it.

And, Rock Music
If I had returned to hostel straight away, it would have been an above average Sunday, but not an exceptional one.
There was some kind of musical show to be expected later in the night. So I stayed back to join my friends. And after the fashion show, beauty pageant, results of previous events, etcetera, it started. A sexy male voice attracting crowd like shit does to flies. +Akshaya Fadnis and I climbed inside the VIP section with the first song. And within minutes we were right next to the stage. And the crowd was going crazy. The music would awaken even the comatose. Hands would not agree to stay down. And the rhythm shook the whole body.

After being completely lost in that experience, I spoke: “Buddha calls it meditation, we call it rock music”

Now, that tranquillity was thanks to Underground Authority.

And that was a Sunday truly worth its name – Sunday. 😛

The answer tells that the British were comfortable with Gandhi heading India, and that complete non-violence was probably a big mistake. Two things.

1. Non-violence works in international affairs. Especially after the second world war.
   This must be self evident. Today’s wars cannot be won with weapons. It is won only through diplomacy.
2. Non-violence works even better in interpersonal affairs.
   This goes without saying. Getting angry and not cooperating with nasty people is how we’ve learned to do it. But that is violent. A better way to do it would be by helping the nasty earnestly, and sternly but politely making them a request to stop being nasty.

But that’s not what surprised me. When someone pointed out in the comments that Gandhi had also told that non-violence is better than cowardice, the answerer said: “Well this shows that he was totally confused“.

People, it’s not just fine to change your convictions with time, it is sometimes necessary to do so.

That is one great lesson from Gandhi that not many have heard of or practise. He conducts experiments with his life. And he corrects himself when he’s proven wrong. Like his U turn on milk, he just needs plenty of reasons.

We form most of our convictions in childhood. The same childhood when we are not even eligible to vote. And amusingly, we carry these convictions to our adult life, unquestioned. Think of it. Would it be clever to make the same choices in food, clothing, dreams, hobbies, and lifestyle as those you made when you were much younger and more stupid?

You’re travelling in a bus, and the person sitting in the first seat at the front suddenly puts his face outside and looks at something. Within milliseconds, people sitting in the window seats in the 5 rows behind him do the same. And in the next few milliseconds, others who can’t just turn their head and see outside, stand up and do so.

Sensing and responding to changes around them as quickly as possible, gives monkeys a survival advantage. And there’s a monkey carrying out its survival trick hiding inside all of us. He guides our senses towards all stuff that’s different from the normal – a cool new gadget, random shit facts, photoshoped images uploaded in facebook, utterly useless questions on quora, the gap that a broken tooth leaves, a friend’s new haircut, uncovered body parts – any stuff that’s new. These are the interesting things.

Unfortunately for us, interesting things most of the times aren’t useful things.

Books, subjects, exams, practice, revision, exercise – things that happen everyday, the normal things. They are what turn out to be useful in one’s life.

It’s only been a fraction of a second since that first person turned his head. You still have a choice – whether to turn your head or not.