It was a dejva vu moment at The Saturday Club Quiz, partnered by The Telegraph. The Wood Street club was crowned champions, yet again. The runner-up trio of last year came second, yet again. And t2 cheered from the sidelines, yet again!
(L-R) Souvik Guha, Anil Vaswani and Ranjan Ray Chowdhury were the winning trio from The Saturday Club. What makes them a winning combination? “Souvik Guha,” pat came the reply from ENT surgeon Ranjan. Can they anticipate the other team’s moves? “Sometimes we assume they’re going to know a particular answer, but if they don’t and it comes to us, that’s a great opportunity,” said Ranjan.
Whose idea was it to rename the team Bhaskar-E-Taiba (earlier called Hammer and Tongs Incorporated)? “The name was not my idea, the other two [Kinshuk Biswas (centre) and Arnab Banerjee (right)] insisted on it to irritate me!” said Bhaskar Datta. “We came a very close second last year, but this year Souvik Guha was in a different league. He’s the unbeatable Arjun of quizzing,” said Bhaskar. #NotASoreLoser
Hastily Put Together was the youngest team to qualify. (L-R) Ananyo Brahma, Rishav Roy and Kishalay Banerjee — all in their 20s and from Jadavpur University, Presidency University and St. Xavier’s College — had met each other in the school quizzing circuit. “We seem to be in Calcutta for the foreseeable future, so it made sense to form a team. In fact, in JU and Presi, we host impromptu quizzes all the time for small groups, which is loads of fun. The quizmasters were great at this quiz,” said Kishalay, a student of statistics honours.
BRAIN FREEZE
♦ Which government organisation divides India into 36 subdivisions, which many feel would be a logical way of creating states?
♦ Artem Vaulin, founder of Kickass Torrents was recently arrested. How did the FBI trace him?
♦ Repton School in Derby used to be sent new product samples from Cadbury for taste-testing. What did this practice inspire?
♦ On July 30, 1930, Jean Langenus of Belgium wore a suit jacket, golfing plus fours and a red striped tie, looking incongruous with the way all the men around him were dressed. What was he doing?
♦ Etymologically what connects words like Newt, Uncle, Nickname (among others, but these more famously so)?
♦ During the 1970s Chaudhary Charan Singh’s attempts at vote bank politics led him to encourage the alliance called AJGAR. What did AJGAR stand for?
ANSWERS
♦ Indian Meteorological Department
♦ Ironically, he was legally purchasing music on iTunes and they tracked his IP address
♦ The novel by Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
♦ Refereeing the first ever Football World Cup final
♦ The articles decided the modern spelling: An ewt became a newt, a nuncle became an uncle, an ekename became a nickname
♦ Ahir, Jat, Gurjar and Rajput
Text: Ramona Sen
Pictures: Arnab Mondal
