Come on, let's quiz… |
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Come on, let's quiz… |
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| If you studied in the most famous school of Dharwad then you have participated in
quizzes umpteen number of times. No, I am no talking about those intellectually
challenging inter-school quiz competitions. But, I am talking about intra-class quiz
competitions. It happens in schools. Teachers do not turn up for some periods. They may be on leave or some other reason. Schools are not so liberal as collages, you know? They do not let students get out of the class and do whatever you want. So, while in the school, whether teacher turns up or not you have to spend the time within the classroom. Normally some available teacher is assigned as an absentee replacement teacher. Thee absentee replacement teachers came in various forms, shapes, sizes and attitudes. We, as students, had only to do with their attitude. Most liked ones were those who used to tell beautiful stories. But, their charm was limited to classes below seventh standard. Who the hell wanted to listen to their mythological or historical stories when you were a teenager? So, such teachers avoided going to higher classes for absentee periods. Another category was those sort of teachers who came to the absent period and let you do anything as long as the noise level in the class remained well below the tolerated limit. There were neither loved nor hated. These were considered to be harmless and students would start variety of exercises to spend time ranging from drawing the cartoon of the teacher to playing book cricket. Book cricket is game where runs are scored after turning a page in random and so on. Most disliked belonged to those who will start teaching something academic or so and made you repent for the absent period which you thought was a gift for the day. Another category of the absentee replacement teachers were those who were very nice. They would let you play stimulating games like quiz, identifying the personalities based on asking questions and so on. These teachers used to be the favorites of the bunch. With their consent a quiz used to be organized in the class. Normally quizzes used to be open-ended and you could ask anything and everything. Sometimes some teachers did try to choose a particular topic. But, consensus could not be reached. Normally girls formed one group and boys formed another group. Some, more socially oriented, teachers believed in dividing the class so that each group had both boys and girls. Groups used to be normally named A and B. A person usually volunteered himself or herself as the score keeper and he had to be sort of neutral and had to keep track of the score accurately. Otherwise he will be subjected to a lot of booing and hooting. With the blackboard cleaned and a scoreboard drawn, we were all set to start the quiz. Who would ask the first question? Normally teacher used to choose which group would ask the first question. It was a random function. I have developed a sort of rough hypothesis that a male teacher used to give the chance to girls and vice versa. Those interested to ask question had to raise the hands. The scorekeeper would choose the one and the person would ask the question. If you wanted to make your hand seen then you should start buttering the volunteer by calling his nick name like "Sandya, ley Sandya" for Sandeep or "Deepya, ley Deepya. Please ley" for Deepak. If a girl was chosen as the scorekeeper then boys did not have any chance of influencing the person to be chosen to ask question. Girls could practice the same technique by yelling "Aaari, ley Aari" for Aarati, "Archi, ley Archi. Please ley" For Archana and so on. Once the question was asked the opposite group used to be given reasonable amount of time to answer the question and if not answered the person who asked the question would tell the answer. Score was updated with a huge applause from the group that garnered points. The process continued till the period got over. Before leaving the class the teacher normally totalled the points scored by each group and then announced who won the quiz. So, what kind of questions was asked normally? I bet you can not imagine the general knowledge of the guys and gals of our time. Everybody used ask questions which had answers only known to the person asking question .If such questions were not asked then how could the points be scored? Some stupid people used to make the mistake of asking questions on current issues or popular acronyms or so on and used to donate points to the opposite group. They used to try fighting it out till the end to avoid such scene by trying all sorts of gimmicks. There are some typical tricks. For example, you could say the answer was close to the expected answer but pronunciation was wrong. I had to lose the credit for answering a question that I am sure none of you know at this moment. Who invented the art of googly bowling? I told the answer and the person did not agree to the way I told it and we had a heated debate and ultimately he being loud mouthed I had to shut myself up and lose the point. There was another instance. The question was what was the full form of PTI. It was correctly answered as Press Trust of India. The questioner did not want to let that point go so easily. He started insisting that it stood for Printing Trust of India. Luckily teacher was aware of the correct answer and the questioner was humiliated and black listed from asking any questions in that session. Opposite group teased him with all hand signs and hoots. Many times questions used to be just comical and center on the popular acronyms for teachers and so on. It was sometime in 87-88 and RT was the friendly acronym for a particular teacher. I can not disclose the full form. But, I tell you "R" was associated with rubber. So, people were asking funny questions like where was the biggest rubber plantation, where is the smallest rubber plantation, which country exports maximum rubber, what is the process of extracting rubber from rubber trees called and so on. The whole intention was to use the word rubber as many times as possible and raise the wave of laughter among the student population. The absentee replacement teachers many times used to wonder why such an innocuous word like rubber made their students giggle and laugh so much. May God help them. As I told before, the teacher used to leave after period got over and the volunteer used to return to his seat. The group that had lost used to feel normally humiliated more because of the hooting from the victors rather the fact that they could not make up vague questions. So, some brave girl or a boy from the losers used to come and alter the score board in such way to make it look like they won. Simplest thing was to go and add a zero at the right end. That person was given a big applause as he returned to his/her seat. Immediately some other son of gun from the opposite side used to march up to the board and alter the score board to reflect their win and so on. This exercise used to continue till the next teacher came. You really had to be a son or daughter of a gun to do this kind of deeds. There was always chance that you could get thoroughly punished if the teacher did not like that. So, sometimes warriors used to make their buddy stand at the door to monitor the suspicious movements of the dangerous teachers. I might have played at least a couple of hundreds of quizzes and asked at least several hundreds of questions ranging from lollypops to good ones to plainly cooked up questions whose answers were the products of my own rich imagination. I also cherish some of the best answers I gave. Does any body know who wrote famous travelogue in Kannada named "Nanoo Amerikege hogidde"? Yes, I remember. I owe you answers to two questions. John Tanden Boswan Kwey invented googly. I am not sure if I spelt the name correctly. But believe me. Answer is correct. I had read that in a Kannada book and do not really know if it is correctly spelt. Dr.Krishnanand Kamat wrote the above mentioned famous travelogue. Who is he? As far as I am concerned my dad knew him. Period. So, keep your senses smart. You may have to play quiz once again somewhere else. I dissected how funny and illogical used to be our quiz games. But, I am not too sure of one thing. Are we not still playing the game over and over? Again and again? Recently I was in a meeting to discuss about new technology initiatives. We did not ask questions but elaborated on each other's favorite technology and so on. The expressions on each face made it very clear to me that the particular terminology used was known only to the person who was speaking and he could really go any length. Yes, we were talking about various things like JDBC, DNS, Marimba, Mugambo, Cacehless clients, Cacheful servers, Thin clients, fat servers, middlewares, top gears and so on. So, the fun of quizzing still continues from classrooms to the boardrooms. Married guys will hasten to add that it continues even in their bedrooms. By Bra-H-Min |
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