Pr0n-n00b’s Quiz

Prateek went last week for this Cricket Quiz held at FICCI Auditorium, organized by Cradle Sports. That in itself isn’t the subject matter, the quizmaster of the event is. It was to be conducted by…[dramatic pause]…Parnab Mukherjee. No, not the defence minister. OK, that didn’t have much of an effect on most readers, did it? Didn’t when I first heard of it, either. To put it in DNA’s words, Parnab Mukherjee would be the ‘bee’s knees and wasp’s nipples’ of Indian quizzing. Or as somebody else put it, he’s the best worst quizmaster in India. The unique thing about him is that he never carries cue cards / any sheet of paper on stage when conducting a quiz. What makes him even more unique is that he makes up BOTH the questions and their answers most of the time. He’s also known as Peter Pan because he claims that his age is 28 years, for the past few years in a row. Boy, talk about mid-life crisis. Also, he (claims to have) studied under John Nash. Do check out this last link, even if you haven’t been sweet enough to click on the links before that. (The comments section, in all the links, are pretty interesting.) Even Lord Samit Basu has spoken about that guy. It’s interesting to note then, on how this guy ends up conducting so many quizzes at IITs and IIMs. Makes me wonder about what the F organizers think when going in for this guy to conduct a quiz.

Shucks. They had to make it a cricket quiz. I’d have happily attended at least at least one Pr0n-n00b quiz, just for the experience (they had an open quiz edition before conducting the school quiz edition the next day). Prateek’s team came second in the quiz, even with the weird questions (kudos to him!). What I was excited about was the fact that NDTV MetroNation was to show it today.

Show, they did. Edit, they didn’t. NDTV telecast an event with the takes which were done by the show anchor when shooting. Evidently, they also believed that a quiz show must consist of montages of people giving answers on stage with cheesy music playing in the background, so viewers didn’t get to see the Great Man in action. NDTV MetroNation hardly has anything worth watching and by NOT showing the event properly they just made a lot of people miss out on a valuable life experience.

That pic of him in this post, BTW, is an old one. My mom walked into the room when I was watching the quiz on MetroNation, looked at him for some time, and then…

Hmm. Looks a lot like you.

Oh, and in other (quizzing) news, DPS VK’s team won the Mod Quiz held at Modern School, Vasant Vihar today. As usual, Mod School’s event organizers seem to think that making inadequate arrangements for teams (so that some teams had to stand while giving the prelims) is a sign of their success rather than their mismanagement. The quiz was conducted by Gurinder Bedi and was a looong 14 round quiz. St Columba’s came second. So there, congratulations to the DPS VK Quiz Club!