Staying in GIM amongst the beautiful Western Ghats sometimes brings out the writer in me, compelling me to write about one of my favourite past times – Quizzes.
As popular perception goes, quizzes aren’t just about trivia or knowing stuff but they have evolved to a much more mature form which relies less on knowledge but more on thinking. Of course, one cannot just sit in a quiz without knowing anything about it. I have been quizzing since I was in class 5 which started with an amazing marketing campaign by Maggi to promote its noodles by having quizzes in schools where the prize was the number of Maggi Noodles’ packs one could hold, I managed a decent 12 J. The first question thrown towards me was “Who is known as the nightingale of India?” and till this date I can never forget this missed opportunity which had a yellow Maggi cap as the prize. After that was the weekly dose of trivia in the form of BQC – Bournvita Quiz Contest – one of my favourite TV shows with the knowledgeable Derek O’Brien who is credited with instilling general knowledge in thousands of children (me included).
To the ignorant, BQC would appear as just a bunch of trivia questions but after dissecting it thoroughly I got to know that BQC was one of the first quizzes which had connect questions and questions which required not only knowledge but also application of mind and a keen eye in a time when quizzing was still immature with questions based on trivia. I guess it all changed with the advent of internet based quizzes and the mass use of Google in India.
This change coincided with me entering engineering. Now I was blessed to enter a college which had its own quizzing club which was around 3 years old full of quizzing gurus where I was a lowly mortal. As everyone else I also initially resisted to the change and tried to follow the old school method of quizzing based on trivia but later fell in line as there wasn’t much left for trivia based quizzing. With online quizzing came the most abused cheat of an online quizzer (me included) which was Google. With this almost all the quiz questions could be easily answered by the click of a button but everything was about to change. Online quizzes with pictorial questions and pictorial connects came into play. But with every long route comes a short-cut and we had the development of a reverse image search engine called tineye.com but wasn’t quite effective.
Around 2009 came the big revolution called Facebook and Twitter which changed the face of quizzing from a pure knowledge based to a knowledge + time based game where the fastest to answer was the winner. The pioneer in this is @kweezzz on twitter which has multiple quizzes daily which can be anything under / over / beyond the sun.
Fast forward to 2011 with Google launching the reverse image search which is more than 10 times powerful than tineye.com we are looking at the new era of the species called “Quizzes”. I don’t know what lies forward but quizzes are sure to evolve and being in BrainVista – the quizzing club of GIM, I am sure that I will be on a lookout for this evolution.
PS – Sarojini Naidu is the nightingale of India.
~ Servesh Jasra
No comments:
Post a Comment