Specialisation is for insects. Super-specialisation is for quizzers.

The joy of setting quizzes on super-specialised topics

I announced this newsletter back in November, with the idea that I will collaborate with a few others, and periodically write about quizzing—and not just a long list of quizzes that are happening, or results of quizzes that have happened. Quizzers get enough of that already from other sources. There is no need of one more newsletter adding to that. (however if you do need such announcements, ping me, and I will add you to the KQA Announcements Whatsapp group)

Somehow, those collaborations never really happened, and we all happily forgot about it. Someone reminded (guilt-tripped) me last week about this newsletter, and so here we are. The first issue of “Pronounced Qua”, an irregular newsletter about quizzing from a KQA perspective.

Super-specialist quizzes

Bangalore is getting a new museum! Science Gallery Bengaluru is under construction next to GKVK, and should open in a few years. They have however been active in curating exhibitions already. They had a lovely one on water—titled Submerge at BIC in early 2020 that I really enjoyed. They currently have an exhibition, virtual of course, going on called Contagion, which as the name suggests, and quite appropriate for the times, is about pandemics. As part of the exhibition, the curator asked me if I could conduct a quiz on the topic. No prize money, no gimmickry, just some two hours worth of quizzing online, where the hope was people answer what they can work out or intelligently guess, or learn something new and interesting from the ones they don’t answer. I did a quiz with some 42 (wasn’t planned, I promise) questions (some of my favourite questions at the end of the newsletter) on infectious diseases. It was great fun with lots of right answers, wrong answers, bouncing and pouncing, and eventually a young doctor narrowly pipped one of India’s best quizzers to finish on top. If you are curious who’s who, there’s a YouTube video.

What I really enjoyed through was the process of setting questions on such a super-specialised topic. It took me back to the days of “MQ¹ meets” that used to happen in KQA circles back in the day. On Sundays when there were no quizzes, and a bunch of us still wanted to quiz, we would get together² and ask 10³ questions on a specific topic. The choice of topic was where these meets got the most interesting. It was never broad topics such as Sports, or Films (or anything that there would be a regular KQA quiz on), but super specific ones such as “non-superhero comics”, “album art”, “famous photographs”, “fashion accessories”, and so on. None of these topics would ever be repeated, only exception being “alcoholic beverages” that proved so popular that it did get repeated by public demand.

Often these MQ meet topics were things I knew very little about, and spending a few hours looking up interesting information was great fun. This was what happened with “infectious diseases” too. I am surprised it was never a MQ meet topic. I think the closest we came to was “parts of the human body”

Here’s an idea to make this newsletter interactive! And also to give question setters subscribing to this a feel for looking up super-specialist topics for interesting questions. Why don’t you readers send in a set of 5 questions on a super-specialist topic—I’ll pick one of my favourite MQ meet topics (surprising given I have two left feet), “Dances”. So, send in 5 questions on Dances, I’ll pick my favourite ten or so, and feature them in the next newsletter. And of course, I will also share all the sets, which you can go through at leisure, drink in hand and snacks beside, as some kind of a virtual unhurried MQ meet.

Now, as mentioned earlier, a few of my favourite questions from the “infectious diseases” MQ meet, oops sorry, quiz for Science Gallery Bengaluru.

1. According to Frank Snowden’s book Epidemics and Society, how was smallpox responsible for the African slave trade?

2. Around 10 years ago, there was a chikungunya endemic in Karnataka. At the same time, there was a much-hyped homoeopathic pill that supposedly made people immune to the disease that was popular. Narendra Nayak studied data from a village where the endemic was active and found that a larger percentage of those who took the pills caught the disease rather than those who did not? Why was this?

3. How did the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, famously documented by Jim Corbett, and responsible for nearly 200 human kills, first develop a taste for human flesh?

4. In April 1917, USA decided to enter World War I, and started mobilizing war efforts. However, between September 1917 and March 1918, more than 30,000 American troops were hospitalized with pneumonia, nearly all as a result of measles, and some 5,700 died. What had caused this outbreak?

5. When the plague epidemic broke out in India in the 1890-1910 period, the response of the British in cities like Bombay and Calcutta was to evict people from crowded urban housing such as chawls and bastis and burn those buildings down before reconstructing. What previous experience was the inspiration behind this policy?

Answers

1. The original plan by the Spanish colonists was to use the native Arawak population on Hispaniola as slaves. However, the outbreak of smallpox among the Arawaks who had no immunity to the disease reduced their population from a million to around 15000, thus necessitating import of slaves from Africa (who weren’t as susceptible to the disease)

2. People who hadn’t taken the pills took more care to ensure that they weren’t getting bitten by mosquitoes

3. Just like it is happening now with COVID, a lot of poor people who could not afford firewood for the multiple funerals that they had to conduct during the Spanish Flu pandemic 100 years ago, left the bodies behind on the banks of the River Ganga in Rudraprayag. The leopard whose territory it was, feasted on these bodies, and when the pandemic ended and his easy supply dried up, decided to go hunting for humans

4. Moving people from different immunological backgrounds (people from cities would have antibodies to a lot more diseases than the ones from villages) into densely populated military camps

5. When the Great Fire of London broke out in 1666 there was a plague epidemic raging in the city. But after the fire and the subsequent reconstruction, the plague died out, especially in the areas affected by the fire

1. MQ stood for Metaquizziks, an old hoary open quizzing team from Bangalore. They started off this tradition of meeting and asking each other questions, and soon others not from MQ also started joining in (that was how I ended up going)

2. While Koshys and Egg Factory were MQ meet venues of the longest standing, these meets also happened at Mitesh’s office, Dibyo’s house, Noon Wines, Painted Platters, Peace Restaurant, and various other places

3. While 10 was the recommended number, some would come in with just 3-4, and enthu cutlets like Appu would set 50. I think I used to average around 15.