Belting it out, above the line
Shobha De, whether in all seriousness or in earnest jest we can’t be very sure of, once reportedly said, “If you draw a line from Bombay to Guwahati, the land below is culture and the land above is agriculture!!”. If a quizzer clambered up onto the lower reaches of the Himalayas with a powerful enough pair of binoculars and peered intently into the Gangetic plains, and beyond, to ascertain the veracity of this statement, one would make out a few important constituents of the “land below”: the old guard of Indian quizzing, Kolkata, and the new waves of Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, as destinations worth undertaking a quizzing pilgrimage to. A cursory glance at the so called “land above” would uncover labyrinthine power corridors, fertile pastures, around five million buffaloes grazing in the previously referenced fertile pastures, and a crematorium for quizzing kinds, past and future alike.
That was then.
Disturbed by these troubled sights, an ad Guru, a high school kid, an army doctor, a budding IT professional and a quizzer just freshly out of college, and may we add, just back from a vacation from the lower Himalayas, decided that the situation called for some thought and subsequent action. Intense thought begs for caffeine, and as such the motley group decided to partake of the libation at the Barista opposite IIT Delhi and convene a rear-guard action to rectify the situation. The date was probably the 4th of June (this is a calculated guess, for who can be sure of such trivialities) and the year was 2006 (this much we are sure of).
Fuelled by muffins and mocha, and with much the same spirit with which a spark abhors a suffocating vacuum, the assembled gentry thought that it was about time that the country's capital have a forum for quizzing at all levels. And we started this group informally that very day. Quite aptly, the brotherhood was cemented with a toast of the humble arabica to an old chestnut concerning the relationship between the kaisi paheli hain yein zindagani ditty from Parineeta and the the versatile French painter, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa. The spelling went around a bit, as do they all in the day of the SMS, and the group was branded Kutub Quizzers. Such was genesis.
That was then. This is now. Our ranks have swollen. A forum of an indulgent few has grown into a group of over hundred members including some of the who's who of Indian quizzing. Some of the old hands of Delhi Quizzing have made a return to quizzing actively, and many keen youngsters in school are following the lead. In one of our quizzes, we counted an eclectic mix of seasoned business managers and gum chewing college teens, blazing entrepreneurs and eager school kids, serious looking PhD's and savvy media hotshots. All enthused by the singularly engrossing pastime of Quizzing.
We have more plans (after all, we have been consuming caffeine in odious lots) and establishing an online presence was one right up there in the priority list. And now that you are here, do take a look around. Who knows what serendipity lurks around the next click?
