BL Block hosted a quiz and antakshari on Kali puja, that saw eight teams taking part. “In 2019, this quiz drew 18 teams from across the city, including those on the professional quizzing circuit. Then again last year we couldn’t hold it at all,” said Shameek Dey Sannamath, secretary of Spectrum, the banner under which the events were held.
The quiz was organised by Arnab Kumar Chakraborty and Sayan Kundu, who was also the quiz master. “I broke my hip bone during Durga puja and am in great pain. Still I came today as I missed it so much when it was cancelled last year. Even this year, it’s an achievement pulling Spectrum off, even though one event — the talent hunt — happened online,” said Arnab.
Incidentally his eight-year-old daughter Arna won the talent hunt in her category, singing an English version of Ajeeb dastan hai yeh.
While many of the quiz questions were too tough for preteen contestants, they all rued missing the answer to a question from their favourite web series Money Heist (see box).
The quiz was won by team Ar jani na, that comprised three hardcore quizzers — Arnabjyoti Paul of Lake Town (a content researcher for reality shows like Dadagiri and Sangeet er Mahajuddho), Nikhil Sarkar of Shyamnagar (who has authored the book Ultimate Sports Quiz Book) and IT sector employee from New Town’s DD Block Sanjay Chakraborty. “I’ve won this quiz six times before, although with different teammates,” said Paul. “Even this year we won by a huge margin.”
The antakshari was conducted by Sayan and Subhasis Sengupta, who was the anchor. Subhasis is not only known to be a good singer but he has founded a WhatsApp group called Bhuli Bisri Yaadein, with select music connoisseurs as well as senior artists such as Javed Akhtar, Usha Uthup, Anup Jalota and Sudesh Bhosale.
“We had prepared songs with the most obscure of letters but were fumbling when we finally had to sing with ‘ma’, the most common beginning for songs,” laughed Angika Chakraborty, who had flown down from Noida to spend Kali puja with friends and family. She and her teammates — Anindita Das and Arindam Mitra — came together after so long that they named their team Onek Bochchor Por.
Indeed the game exuded an adda-like ambience with teams faking competition by pointing out the most minor mistakes in others or coming together to clap to the beats of Param Sundari when one of the teams sang it.
Besides regular antakshri, the game had a round where they had to sing the title track of films from which songs were played. Another round where, say, a Bengali song was played, teams had to sing its Hindi version. Songs like Manchali o manchali/ Phulkari re phulkali and Bheegi bheegi si/ Prithibi ta naki chhoto hote hote were asked.
Team Onek Bochchor Por won.
Quiz time
1 What’s common to countries like Japan, Kenya, Germany, Finland, Russia and Sweden?
2 The only temple of this mythological villain is in Kerala. People there worship him for his intelligence and determination and claim circumstances forced him to take revenge. Who is the temple dedicated to?
3 The 1985 film Kabhie Ajnabi The starred Poonam Dhillon and Debasree Roy. Who were the male stars of the film?
4 What did umpire Billy Bowden do — that was a first in international cricket — when Australian bowler Glen McGrath bowled a mock underarm ball to New Zealand in 2005?
5 The national flower of Scotland — thistle — is most significantly present on the logo of which Scottish company that was founded in the 1770s with the contribution of Nobel laureates?
Answers
1 Characters of the popular web series Money Heist are named after capital cities of these countries.
2 Shakuni
3 Cricketers Sandeep Patil and Syed Kirmani
4 He showed McGrath a red card
5 Encyclopædia Britannica
