A human being and a book both have it. What is it?

The teams failed to answer.

The answer: Spine.

It was not a quiz for school students but their principals and teachers last Friday.

SRM University presents RELASK, The Principals’ Meet, with TTIS at the Bengal Club, gave them an opportunity to unwind and bond.

To break the ice, quizmaster and host Barry O’Brien took the principals through a series of questions and a few googlies as well.

The questions ranged from the trivial to the serious. The first round pitted schools north of Park Street against those south.

So when Victor Singh, the principal of The Assembly of God Church School on Park Street, got the full form of RTE (The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education) Act right, he had to be in the middle.

Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio better known as? “Pope Francis,” answered J.K. Sen, the director of education and development at Julien Day Group of Schools, to position himself in the north zone.

While some of the posers were answered at lightning speed, others had the principals thinking for ages and some were even passed.

From identifying books by their covers to finding a Calcutta connection for the names of lanes, the heads of schools had to think on their feet all evening.

They were quick to identify Balraj Sahni but were stumped by a picture of Ban-Ki-Moon, the UN secretary general, having “switched current affairs off 10-15-20 years back”!

But one they did not miss was “Which school in Calcutta gave its name Free School Street?” The answer: Free School, which later shifted to Kidderpore and renamed St. Thomas’.