Introducing "Friday Quiz" - Reinventing Quizzing for the Digital Age

Why do you indulge in quizzing?

Can't you get all unnecessary information about every damn thing in Google? 

I posed these questions so flippantly as to sound cruel, to a dear avid quizzer friend of mine. He became silent. Fumbling for words, he said, "Well..You quiz because you love doing that! "Of course, I knew he could never give me an intellectual answer for matters pertaining to the heart.

Even if he tried to convey, what it feels like when the neurons rush madly like sperms, sieving through random zillion bits of memories, until one lone neuron stumbles upon the elusive E-spot to let the heart shriek in orgasmic bliss, I could have never felt Eureka! 

I could only contend myself learning about Oxytocin and Prolactin - those odd hormones responsible for post-Eureka bliss!

This wasn't the case during my childhood days when the average quizzer in me delighted in remembering every little trivia about books. Watching Bournvita Quiz Contest at home in my obese Telerama television set with a shutter (they don't make those things anymore!) used to be my favorite weekly ritual of intellectual fantasy. In those brief moments, I imagined becoming a celebrity inside my drawing room, answering all the hard nut questions related to books.

This obsession helped me win a crucial tie-up round at a National Quiz contest, sponsored by Maggi Noodles. I remember thudding the buzzer real hard. My joy knew no bounds as I yawped my long first name for the question, "Who wrote the book: My presidential years?".

As I went ahead to the next round, I realized I knew little.

I still remember that embarrassing now-where-do-I-bury-my-head silence to the question: What do you call a young swan? (Yes, I know, I sucked big time, I learnt about Cygnet later), while my competitors began prancing while stuck in their seats, mocking at my ignorance for squandering a charitable question. 

As I painfully learned to live with the limitations of my knowledge, I decided to pursue other interests, leaving quizzing to lesser mortals who never understood the simple obvious fact that it was impossible to know everything in this world!

As I began to fall in love with the Internet, I became even more cynical of quizzing, which seemed so out of fashion in a world where Google was the mythical, wish-fulfilling Kalpavriksha tree of knowledge, granting everything its supplicants desired for.

Everything seemed fine until few months ago, when I received a mail from an old quizzing group which I used to be a part of.

My eyes paused for a second larger, without my unconscious, trigger-happy habit to hit 'Delete'.

I read the mail slowly enough to go on a brief nostalgic trail to those feverish quizzing moments of my life. 

I thought I had moved on in my life, having made peace with her long ago.  

Those effervescent memories bubbled forth yet another day, catching me in surprise, when I sat back and wallowed in modern life's little pleasures, with a restless mind and a remote in hand.

I was at my sister's place with my niece, after a wrist-breaking day at work.

My energies suddenly cracked up from nowhere the moment I saw a bunch of curious kids furiously hitting the buzzer on the screen.

Those familiar pangs of love came back.

I made sure that I sat stoic, with no apparent uneasiness in front of my ten year old niece who sat besides me in the drawing room. I wasn't sure if I wanted to show my forlorn passion in front of her. 

Although I felt I should change the channel to avoid discomfort, my hands dared not to touch the remote. Before I could gather what I was doing, I had already hooted Bacillus Thuringenesis before any of the smart kids could answer, "What is Bt in Bt. Brinjal?".

My niece looked at me, with a smile that carried adulation and pride about her "Mama" who knew the answer to the question asked in the TV.

I was in seventh heaven.

Pulling her to sit on my lap, I told her, "You should really try quizzing. Its so much fun to know!" She kissed my cheeks, as her cherubic face, radiating with joy, was infected by my quizzing enthusiasm.

I rediscovered the joy of working out those unused quizzing muscles, answering the rapid fire round, as we both sat and watched the quiz till the end.

God knows what we are smoking these days.

Can you imagine what would happen to humanity when ignorance becomes a taboo, an anxious impulse to be smothered immediately by the gadgetry of our palms?

Quizzing has no choice but to be the Last Action Hero of our olden times, a conscientious act of resistance against the digital age, conspiring to colonize the knowledge into meaningless sets of zeroes and ones. 

Let me assure you. Don't panic! It's okay to let the machines get smart with artificial intelligence by the pattern of dots shaping the contours of our knowledge.

They will have no choice but to contend only with the map, without any iota of the territory, for they can never fathom the passionate depths of human curiosity, which exults in holding the infinity within its bosom, striving every moment to conquer the no man's land between the known and the unknown.  

Some time back, during one of my conversations on the perilous borderlands of knowing and knowledge with the Internet's own philosopher, David Weinberg, we wondered if humankind would have invented the concept of knowledge had we started with the Internet instead of writing on physical things like parchment and paper.

He believed we still would have, as it is deeply difficult for the mind to conceive knowing as a pure process, without the comforting solidity of knowledge.

Perhaps, humans in their salad days invented knowledge to comfort themselves from the painful truth of not knowing.

To navigate a world that was dangerously unfamiliar, it behooved them to create maps where zones of familiarly known were clearly delineated.

Today, we have come a full circle.

Enmeshed in the sterile, digital noise of the "familiarly known", we need to discover new muscles of knowing to break away from the charade of our knowledge.

We need to learn the Art of Knowing to remain human among the games our networked selves play with algorithms every moment.

Perhaps, it is time we respectfully disregard the well-intended, elders's advice to the impetuous millennials: Don't reinvent the wheel.

When the tools of our own making are evolving at a faster pace than the human knowledge , we have to reinvent the wheel every time.There's no other choice. 

Welcome to "The Friday Quiz"

Every Friday, give yourself the excuse to be human.

If you profess to be a knowledge worker of the 21st century, you ought to work out with your muscles of knowing. As simple as that.

Of course, feel free to completely miss the point of the game, if you choose to google out the answers.

1) I wish I were alive this moment. Yes, I no longer exist. I have filed for bankruptcy in the Tokyo District Court. Experts are all over the place, narrating my woes . They say I died because I failed to build a relationship of trust with automakers. How does a company go from a global leader in its industry to filing for biggest post-war bankruptcy in a matter of years? Ask me.

Nearly 100 million cars were recalled globally, due to a defect with the ammonium nitrate propellant used to inflate them.

My founding family fought hard to resist filing bankruptcy. But to no avail. I had 80 billion yen in cash and deposits. There was utter management chaos in the board. Executives raged, while engineers fled.

Who am I? Why did I die?

2) We, the Indians consume more than one fifth of X produced in the world. Lancet Magazine recently said more than two-thirds of X consumed in the country is unrecorded, mainly illicit.

“Any analyst will tell you that for X, India is one of the most complex markets in the world"

Every state has its own policies, procedures and excise tax structures with very little harmony between them. They are outside the GST system too !

What is X? Why is X the most complex market in India?

3) A flamboyant billionaire, known for showbiz, was quoted saying this.

"The purpose is not to accumulate any great wealth for myself. Look, there is an empire worth crores, no, hundreds of crores around us today, but even today, I sleep in a hut on the floor. Whatever I have got from the country, it is for the country. "

Who are we talking about?

4) An Indian Monk gave an interview for "The Hindu", in the year 1897.

Q:"What did you see in Japan, and is there any chance of India following in the progressive steps of Japan?"

A: "None whatever, until all the three hundred millions of India combine together as a whole nation.

....

Q: "Is it your wish that India should become like Japan?"

A: "Decidedly not. India should continue to be what she is. How could India ever become like Japan, or any nation for the matter of that?

Who is this Indian Monk? What makes these words contemporary, as if somebody spoke these words, not in 1897, but in 2017?

5) Although my family name was different, the name given by my maternal uncle became extremely popular. During my lifetime, I brought in changes into the bureaucracy and the judiciary, and made efforts to "modernize" Nepal.

Historians have blamed me for bringing dictatorship which repressed the nation's potential for 104 years from 1846 to 1951 and left it in a primitive economic condition.

Who am I? Why is it important to understand my story to comprehend what is happening now at Naxalbari and Gorkhaland?

Do write the answers in comments. Answers need not be just about "Who" and "What" alone. Feel free to attempt "Whys" as well, and join the dialogue with the community.

I haven't thought of a reward yet for the quickest human to answer these questions. What reward do you think you should get to assert your Human Intelligence in this age of Artificial Intelligence?

Do you feel inspired to come up with your own quiz questions to be featured in future editions of the blog? Write to me. I am all ears.