Explaining this keeda called trivia

Could Internet extricate desi quizzing from snobbery fields of the ’90s, turning it into a popular sport? I see hope

Quizzer is a personality type. Many of whom diagnosed with it don’t quiz, formally. Most, I notice, are men. Their innate propensity to retain and offer an added piece of useless but interesting detail on a name/place/animal/thing they come across is where, I suspect, mansplaining comes from. (Of course, I’m kidding).

In India a majority of formal quizzers are Bengali. To a point that the only time I’ve been in an inter-school team without one, we called ourselves Four Non Bongs! 

What’s a quiz? A word coined by an 18th Century theatre manager Richard Daley, over a bet that he could string together four random letters, plaster them all over the walls of Dublin, and it would become a word, by the end of 48 hours!

If you’re asked this question at a quiz, it’d be called a sitter. Like identifying a George Stubbs painting, because there’s a horse in it — the middle school equivalent of which is knowing Claude Monet from water lilies. Even if you otherwise can’t tell art from fart.

It’s just too easy in the hierarchy of ‘trivia’ — which in turn comes from the Latin word ‘trivium’, where three roads meet, signifying, I guess, something that’s commonplace. ‘Trivium’ is also a sitter question.

Because quizzing at ground level is a circuit, comprising serial contestants, rendering unknown facts into “old chestnuts”, since they’ve been asked that before. Hence it’s not a revelation anymore. No matter how cool the trivia — ideally determined by either the answer or the question making you go: “Damn how do/did I not know this?” 

Is that how Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), India’s most loved/popular quiz works? Initially, I recall, it did. And then Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which was based on KBC, happened.

It simultaneously turned KBC episodes into similarly scripted stories of the triumph of the underdog — you cast the contestant, initially ask about stuff they will definitely know (given their background); tough questions that follow qualify in Indian home/parental parlance simply as Ghotu/General Knowledge (GK). You either get it, or you don’t. 

You can barely work it out, which is precisely what you’re supposed to do in a quiz, connecting multiple dots, based on totally random stuff you’ve read, watched, heard, here, there…. This is an odd reversal of rote learning for Indian kids — revenge of the nerds, so to say, taking pride in everything they’ve picked up from outside the classroom.

For instance, a question I recall setting in high school: Named Bosie in Australia, after the inventor, it gets its popular name from eyes that are protruding. Its first victim was Samuel Coe at St John’s Wood, in 1900…. Invention? 

Bosie = Bernard Bosanquet; protruding eyes = goggle; St John’s Wood = Lord’s; Samuel Coe = cricketer… Answer: Googly. Yup, you can google this. How would you arrive at several hints for any story before Internet? 

Besides hours at the library, participating in quizzes and filling up personal quiz diaries, building a gated community of similarly inclined geeks, relentlessly trading facts that stay within. 

As the ’80s Bangalore college kids do in Q’s Brahman Naman (Netflix) — only feature film I know that deliciously maps this desi sub-culture of adorably arrogant, high-fiving trivia freaks, seeking both self-esteem and nirvana in nothingness. Where would these quizzers graduate to after college? 

‘Open quizzes’, which like calculus introduced in CBSE math after Class X, takes trivia to such a rarefied space — of telling Allen Ginsberg without a beard from a photograph, or everything about late 19th Century cricketer Victor Trumper being a sitter — that it sucks the lifeblood out of knowing anything that you’ve candidly observed yourself. 

If you aren’t gigging with these gents on a regular basis, you stop being a quizzer. At least I did, casually noting down fun facts I’d stumble upon during the course of my work. For, what else to do when you see what you wish to save! Could Google’s existence finally extract the snobbery out of casual quizzing forever, and turn it into a legit/proper popular sport it ought to be? 

Since beardless Ginsberg and topper Trumper are just a search away? So what’s the big deal? And everyone at any point is on the Internet, could you just be tested on what you’re naturally interested in then? Each one scaling heights for their own set of goggle eyes on Google, drawing from memory, mixed with lateral thinking? Rather than being ‘quizzers’, as it were? Done right, yes. 

Or so I hope, hosting a panel Bollywood quiz for India Wants To Know, organised by trivia-smith Sai Ganesh, this Sunday. My favourite question is a clip with Akshay Kumar in thongs in a song called ‘Handsome man handsome man’, with the description of the movie involving a plan to beat international criminal Dragon. Answer? Mr Bond (1992).

Which by the way is the title of the movie Aamir Khan scalps tickets for in Rangeela (1995). Sticking to ’90s on YouTube is a rando clip of the song ‘La doonga la doonga’ with Sanjay Dutt. What were the original words until censors changed it thus? ‘Daloonga daloonga’. Why does everyone know this? Just. They can’t help it. Told ya, it’s a personality type!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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