There was a time when saying that you liked 'to quiz' – pitting one's knowledge base against other quizzers – was dangerous. People would harangue you about finding a more desirable hobby, or yap about a little learning being a dangerous thing, or say something that ended with the dismissive phrase 'Morons with memories'. I learnt, over many years, that the best defence was to laugh at such responses, and ask whether national hobbies such as obsessing over cricket, minority-hatred or trawling the Internet for BBWs ('big, beautiful women', for the uninitiated) struck anybody as particularly more mature.
I don't find myself defending the pastime anymore. The 'knowledge economy' has resulted in a comical world in which quizzing is respectable. Nurturing a quiz team is one of the ways in which a business school can prove that their MBA packs muscle. Holding a quiz is the means by which folks in corporate employ can reassure themselves that they are knowledge-workers. And so on.
Neither way of looking at quizzing does it any justice. The second quiz I attended, while still in school, might say more. The first had ended in the inevitable headache that comes from making too many demands of one's memory. The second was longer, and was conducted by a kindly old man. One of the questions was about Zen having derived its name from a word in another language. I decided it had to be an Indian language, and set about trying to find a word that sounded like Zen. I came up with dhyana, and that was the correct answer. A little later, we were shown a slide of boys stomping around a court and asked to identify the sport. I noticed that there were no rackets involved, and remembered that the characters in P G Wodehouse's school novels played something called fives without rackets, and my guess was right again. I had never experienced anything similar before – random, half-forgotten details combining like this to offer a 'Eureka!' moment. I was hooked for life.
The old man who took us through 12 rounds of quizzing was G R Mulky, a retired Indian Air Force officer who founded the Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA). He ran the association singlehandedly for a decade and a half, and in that time the KQA's quizzes were perhaps the first space in which convent schools and ordinary schools, general degree colleges and professional colleges, and Kannada-speakers and chattering Anglophiles all met in open competition – not an easy thing to achieve in a small but strictly divided city. His efforts resulted in Bangalore's distinctive quizzing culture – small-scale, regularly held events, an emphasis on working answers out rather than on memory, and an easy, irreverent democracy among those who participate.