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!
24 replies on “Pr0n-n00b’s Quiz”
You didn’t answer the question that all readers are most curious about – did Mr P Mukherjee live up to his reputation ?
@Kuttapan: I don’t really know, I didn’t go for the quiz. Prateek tells me that he did indeed ask a lot of crazy questions, but apparently he’d been asked to ‘be sensible’ by the Cradle Sports team (the event organizers) so…people did miss out on the ‘fun’. 😉
One more interesting thing about the quiz was that on NDTV MetroNation, they showed that all the prelims papers were checked ON STAGE, in front of all the teams. Methinks it’s a nice touch.
@ Ankur and Kuttapan – Yes Ankur, they indeed did check all the papers on stage! Even I was amazed…to see that. They had the boys and girls from AAG (Academy of Animation and Gaming!) checking them….As Parnab read out the prelims answers.
Well, to be frank Parnab did not do a very bad job of it either. He conducted a quiz with a mix of brilliant, weird and boring qns sometimes…He definitely did not “manufacture” answers for most of the qns – Thankfully!! Yes there were some crazy qns for sure…But I wud give the Quiz a rating of 5/10.
I wud agree with ur mom, Ankur that u do resemble him a bit 😉 – U can try to do a “Parnab” this year at Code Wars!
Congrats to the DPSVK QC for winning the MOD Quiz 2008.
We wanted to participate in this year’s edition of the MOD Quiz but when we contacted them, they refused to let us in. They have always been stingy about invites and registration stuff…And they are not too eager about many schools coming for their events! (Quite amazingly)…Co-incidentally, one of the co-founders of Cradle Sports, Mr Arindam Bhattacharya, is an alumnus of Modern School, Vasant Vihar – He told me that he had conducted the MOD Quiz in the 90s
and now the quiz is in dire straits and has gone to dogs..Because of the authorities and the teachers. He told me that they wud be conducting the MOD Quiz from next year for sure…(Provided they are allowed to!) – So I suppose maybe next year’s edition will have Parnab as the quizmaster!
I will be posting a full review and questions from the Cricket quiz on my blog later…So do check that out!
The Metro Nation telecast of the Quiz left much to be desired for…! The editing was crap, and all irrelevant stuff was shown….
@Prateek: Checking papers right in front of stage is I think a very good move. Even though it may not make much of a difference, it’s a good reassurance for participants to show that transparency is there.
I generally do not use paper too. 😉 I do carry the answer script, but I rarely refer to it – never really used it either during Code Wars or the Inter-DPS. So there, I think I resemble Parnab even more. 😉
It’d be nice if Mod Quiz gets better management. Last time in Modem, they made DPS RKP wait outside because they hadn’t registered beforehand. And they considered it to be their ‘success’ that ‘there are teams standing outside’. Let’s hope Arindam gets to conduct the quiz next year…
@ Ankur – Yes I totally agree with you. One of the positives of this quiz was that they were very transparent. They told us our Prelims score (19.5 on 30), which was incidentally, the highest and also the cut-off , which I think was very low – 6.
Yes, u surely do resemble Parnab there – So do we have a Parnab in the making?
But even I do quizzes (whatever I have done till now) without any cue cards or papers. I only refer to the slides.
Yes the MOD Quiz wud be much better off if Mr Arindam does it.
U told me abt the DPS Incident…quite sad…I mean if they cud let DPS wait than whats New Era!
@Prateek: That’s really nice of them, telling the qualification scores too!
msvv is bad…last time we were the winners AND the 2nd runner up (we had 2 teams) and this time, we didnt get an invite!
@Agrim: That’s one thing which really sucks about MSVV events – their restrictions on the number of teams appearing. 🙁
@ Ankur – Yes thats quite rite! Do see the review of the MOD Quiz 2008 on the Modern VV Website – Only 12 Schools participated…They send invites on their own whims and fancies I guess!