In the early 2000s, I was introduced to a boy named Kelvin, a friend of a friend. I noticed how he braced himself for the inevitable joke about Kelvinator refrigerators.

I didn’t make one. Instead I told him he was probably named for Lord Kelvin, who worked out a system to mark absolute zero or infinite cold in thermodynamics, a scale independent of Fahrenheit and Celsius. I wasn’t looking to impress him, but I would have liked some acknowledgement that I’d helped him understand his unusual name.

Kelvin, however, just blankly shrugged. In fact, the incident taught me a lesson: some people just aren’t interested in trivia. They’ll never be excited about learning something random just for the fun of it.

Don’t be like Kelvin! Attend the Mumbai Quiz Festival this weekend (March 9 and 10) to see what people who love trivia get up to. There are themed quizzes and you can choose to participate or just grab a seat and watch know-it-alls pit against other know-it-alls to arrive at answers that make you think, “Damn, I know this stuff, I’m a bit of a know-it-all too”.

Rajiv Rai, president of the Bombay Quiz Club, and banker until recently, has been quizzing since he was a student (in 1987.) Trivial pursuits have changed since then, he says. “Not everyone had access to information before the internet. Books were expensive, so you got an uncle to send you some from abroad, or joined a library, or you picked up brochures when you travelled. If you did know a few things you were the king.”

Quizzes then tested the basics: Capital cities, names of heads of state, Nobel laureates and, of course, Lord Kelvin’s contribution to science.

Now, as we’re drowning in information, quizzing is more about how well you can recall and retrieve what’s in your head. A good quiz will get you to work out answers you didn’t know you knew.

Rai believes a good quiz will have five distinguishing features. Original questions (not stuff pulled off Wikipedia, particularly because quizzers have long memories). A good balance between the arbitrary and the obvious (it should tell you something surprising about something familiar, or vice versa). Enough clues so you can work out the answer (dates, adjectives, names and the like). Intelligent phrasing (so you have to pay attention of what is and isn’t said). And creativity (obviously).

This year’s edition has a quiz in the memory of Vikram Joshi, world quizzing champ who passed away last year. A few crossword experts have a special themed quiz. And because this is Mumbai, there are a whole lot of questions about movies, the performing arts, business and popular culture. Can you crack my favourite questions (No, not you Kelvin!)?

1. The region of Genoa, Italy, was where thick cotton corduroy was cheaply manufactured to make durable pants for sailors. In Nimes, the French recreated that durability with a distinctive twill weave that we still wear today. What two words for the same item of clothing come from these cities?

2. In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon refers to one that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later. What name is given to a taxon that is believed to be extinct (or ‘left the building’) but is falsely claimed to still exist?

3. His parents had three sons and a daughter. All three boys died in infancy. Fearing that a curse had targeted the male children, the parents raised their fourth son as a girl for the first few years of his life, he also wore a nose ring, which gave him a nickname that stuck through adulthood. The nation has known this name since 1948.

4. In clinical trials, this heart-disease drug was found to have an interesting side-effect for men. It also offered women four-hour relief from period cramps. But the all-male review panel decided that cramps were not a public health priority and diverted funding to market the drug towards men. Name the little blue pill.

5. The world’s largest distributor of toys isn’t Santa and isn’t even a shop. Name the multinational company whose toy retail programme has had backlash from childhood obesity activists since the 1990s.

The Mumbai Quiz Festival is on March 9 and 10, 9.30am onwards, at the Hall Of Harmony, Nehru Centre, Worli.

First Published: Mar 08, 2019 22:39 IST