Of the menagerie of groups, peoples and ethnicities that made up quintessential Calcutta, the most eccentric were the Parsis and the Anglo-Indians. One uses the past tense because those communities and the city they represented have largely moved on. With the passing of Neil O'Brien on June 24, that sentiment is even more pronounced. O'Brien was not just the Anglo-Indian patriarch, he was a Calcutta institution.

O'Brien was the original Calcutta nerd, an educationist involved with school administration and head of the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, chairman and managing director of Oxford University Press, and representative of the community in the West Bengal assembly (1977-1991) and, later, in Parliament.

Above all, he was the "Man who knew Everything", a nickname given to him by those he competed against and almost always defeated in quizzes, usually at his second home, the Dalhousie Institute. From arcane church ceremonies to unknown boxers to obscure events in Greek mythology, there was seemingly nothing he couldn't conjure up from the recesses of his mind. In a pre-Google age, O'Brien was a walking encyclopedia.

He was born in Calcutta on May 10, 1934. Typical of him, he marvelled that his birthday coincided with the date of the uprising in Meerut in 1857. That was just before the O'Brien saga began in India, with the arrival of Thomas O'Brien, an Irish soldier who fought and won a medal in the Bhutan War of 1864-65. Succeeding generations went into a variety of professions. O'Brien's father, Amos,was the first Christian to serve as head of the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University. Amos's brother, a civil servant, served under Sir Olaf Caroe, the governor of the North-West Frontier Province. In the 1940s, with a Japanese invasion looming, young Neil was packed off to Peshawar to be with his cousins. Accompanying him was his paternal grandmother Nellie, a Bengali Christian and one of Bengal's earliest women doctors. Nellie brought up Neil and was a life-long influence. She was instrumental in persuading him to enrol for a master's degree and not get lured into the customs or the police (which had job quotas for Anglo-Indians in the 1950s) after graduating from St Xavier's College. That, combined with the determined belief that he was not going to migrate as so many Anglo-Indians did, marked out O'Brien as different. It was as an MA student that he met Joyce, as gregarious as he was reserved, and the happy child of a large railway family of 10 siblings. She was the perfect complement and they married in 1959. He taught her Bengali, though she never quite managed to teach him Telugu.

Publishing was O'Brien's calling. In 1956, he joined Longman as a trainee, and nine years later OUP. It was a hard life, especially as his family grew and Derek, Andy and Barry were born. In those early years, he would teach a 6 am class to B.Com students at St Xavier's, then go to office, supplementing his income with tuitions in the evening. The commitment to OUP was absolute. In 1991, the lawyer, Frank Anthony, having served many terms as Anglo-Indian member in the Lok Sabha, sounded out O'Brien. OUP was reluctant to have a full-time employee as an MP and told O'Brien he would need to sacrifice hopes of becoming chairman. He turned down Parliament, waiting till 1997, when he had retired from publishing.

In 1966, on a business trip to London, he saw his first quiz and was hooked. The following year, he conducted the first open quiz in Calcutta, almost as an experiment. As he mixed his questions, written on slips of paper and placed in a box, and announced in that rich baritone, "First question of the evening", he didn't know what he was starting. Or maybe he did. He knew everything.