A pillar

Here is a challenge for all of you. It is going to be World Heritage Day on April 18. On that day, watch out for my tweet at Shantaram on Twitter and answer the question that's going to come up there.

You get the advantage if you figure out where this signboard is. It is very much in Chennai city, in a place that has a very high traffic flow. The traffic is so heavy that hardly anyone notices this sign. 

Go for it!

 

Question back

It was unreasonably exciting to be back at an open quiz after... well, quite a while. The Republic Day quiz began in 2002 as something of a counterbalance to the Landmark Quiz, which has morphed into something else, I think. 

And the Quiz did not disappoint. Great questions, great participation, a celebration of the trivial and the esoteric. The school kids - there were quite a lot of them participating - were all enthusiastic to the extent that the Quizmaster had to shush them up every now and then, for fear that they'd give away the answers to the teams on stage. 

Came away feeling that it is time to get back into the quizzing groove. Soon, soon!

 

Quiztime, again

Saturday afternoon, and it was probably the last big event of this year's Madras Week celebrations. The Murugappa Madras Quotient Quiz for school kids was held on the 6th. The Sir Mutha Venkat Subba Rao Concert Hall was packed - teams from over 250 schools took part in the quiz. 

The kids seemed to be having a good time. That's one of the enthusiastic team captains jumping up to get the answer sheet for her team!

Couple of questions

This was in front of the Chenna Kesava temple at Chindatripet. The elephant seems to be guarding the chariot with its colourful cylindrical cloth hangings - called தொம்பை ("thombai") in Tamizh. And no, the elephant hasn't fallen flat on its tummy, it is supposed to be doing something else.

So here are the questions: the first is What is the English word for தொம்பை ("thombai")?

The second question has been borrowed from Quizzerix - how would you connect what the elephant is doing with a happening spot in Velachery? A clue is that you need to think on the same lines as for an earlier question on this blog. And like then, if you get it right, I shall let you take me, and I promise to enjoy it. 

But if you let me have an answer to the first question, I shall take you to the Velachery connect!

Lighthouse trivia

I have posted earlier about Chennai's newest lighthouse, but this picture was too good to ignore, so I'm re-hashing some of the trivia around this lighthouse. 

It is the only lighthouse in India that has a triangular cross section (for the most part, at least). It is also the only lighthouse in India that has an elevator inside it. It's counterpart on the second point in the USA - the only lighthouse with an elevator - is called the Charleston Light, at Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. Incidentally, that is also a triangular building!

Right wrong

Do you find anything odd about the cars on this road? No? Look again and you will notice that both the vehicles are on the wrong side of the road, which, in India is the right.

This is probably the only stretch of public road in Chennai where you are allowed - actually expected - to drive on the wrong side of a two-way street. Traffic on Luz Church Road - where the white car is turning in from - is only westbound, while Musiri Subramaniam Road, nearer to us, permits vehicles to only go east. This bit of road is where they changeover, if they need to. The flow is much smoother if you to stick to your right when making the U-turn. 

Everyone has naturally adjusted to it, to the extent that quite a few of my friends - including some who use this route regularly - refused to believe me when I mentioned they were violating traffic rules!

Interior, day.

Well, it is not exactly the setting for a play, but it just gives you a sense of what the Museum Theatre looks like inside. It is quite a steep drop from the doors to the stage, giving you a sense of being in an amphitheatre of olden days. A big difference is that the hall is not really semi-circular, but more a deep horseshoe. It was built more for vocal expositions than for theatrics, which is probably why it was okay to have seats at 90-degree angle to the stage. In today's times, someone in that seat would miss out on almost every expression the actors convey, so there are always two wedges of empty seats along the sides.

The 'pit' is not really as well defined as the one in the Music Academy; in fact, it is non-existent, if I'm right. Now that I think about it, I realize I have no idea where the production crew, which would normally be in the pit, sits in this theatre. The space in front of the stage is filled with seats, almost up to the footlights. There are about a hundred seats there and those are the pricey ones; if you've opted for a cheaper ticket, the best thing to do is to rush in when the doors open and take your place somewhere just behind a railing which separates the 'front-benchers' from the rest.

For this event, there were no tickets - it was a quiz competition and everyone was trying hard to get into the front, so as to not miss a single pixel of the questions being projected - and during the break, one member of each team seems to have stayed behind to guard the hard-earned seating!

Another day, another quiz

The contrast with a quiz that happened barely ten days ago couldn't be starker. The Landmark Quiz was held in a large auditorium, with cushioned seats, advance registration, assigned seating, coordinated lighting, visuals, slick presentations and tons of prize money. The Madras Quiz on the other hand was in a small hall tucked away inside Karpagambal Nagar, near Luz - finding the hall seemed to be an elimination round in itself, even with Google Maps. And then it was walk-in registration, find your seats, jump up to see the question on screen, have fun and fight it out to show off who knows more about Chennai - no prizes though, ladies and gentlemen, just the bragging rights.

The teams that went up on 'stage' (a makeshift platform, actually) for the finals certainly deserved their bragging rights. A tough preliminary round sorted out all those who knew only parts of the City and the teams that went up knew a lot, from the names of the Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, the Commissioner of the Corporation of Chennai to that of the oil tanker which played a role in resolving the fuel crisis of July 1 and the location of the PK Srinivasan Maths Research Foundation. The finals saw some stiff competition before the winning team (VV Ramanan & Ramkumar Shankar) came through with a 1-answer margin. The point however, as Vincent D'Souza, the quizmaster and one of the founders of Madras Day said, was to create an interest and appreciation of the variety that Chennai city offers.

And the variety was reflected in the events of this year's Madras Day celebrations - heritage walks, nature walks, photowalks, exhibitions, food festival, book releases, the Madras Musings lecture series - now that it is all over, I just can't wait for the next birthday party!

The landmark event

There is a story about how James Daly, a theatre owner in Dublin went around one night scrawling the word 'Quiz?' on several walls of the city. By the next day, many people had seen this word and understood that it indicated some kind of test of knowledge; thus did Daly win on a bet that he could, overnight, introduce a new word into English! I'm not sure if this story is entirely true; if it were proven to be false, one reason could be that Daly scrawled the word not on the walls of Dublin, but on those of Madras.

Where else can you hope to find over 2000 people gathering on a holiday afternoon to do nothing other than answer 40 questions (ranging from "Other than India, which two countries celebrate their Independence Day on August 15?" to "What would you find right on top of the Wimbledon Men's Singles Trophy?"). A large majority of them do it despite knowing that to be one of the 8 teams qualifying for the finals typically needs a score upwards of 30. That's the charm of the Landmark Quiz: they make you believe that you are only 2 points away from qualifying for the finals and then leave you knowing just that little more than when you started the quiz, though you would have ended scoring only 13 points! And therefore you come back the next year, because you know that if it is August 15, it must be the Landmark Quiz in Chennai.

This is the 15th consecutive year of the Quiz; in that time it has grown to be India's largest open quiz, attracting teams from nearby cities. It has also moved and includes a Bangalore and a Pune edition too, with the top teams from these cities fighting it out in the National Finals (begun this year). Of course, that was won by a team from Chennai, who had qualified after travelling to Bangalore and winning the quiz there - with such a record, how can any other city claim to be the quiz capital of India?