The Dalhousie Institute, a haven for quizzing, once again brought to its members an evening of pure intellectual stimulation – The Tin-n-bottle Family Quiz.
The interesting name represents a DI tradition - Each participant brings bottles or tins, building a hamper which goes to the winning 3 teams. This year the generous hamper had several delectable items – from peanut butter to juices, from sauces to jams. Generous sponsorship from Keventer, Starmark and ITC added to the prize booty.
This family quiz, on January 20th evening, had participants whose age was still a single digit number and others in double digits. Each team had a healthy mix of children and adults, each learning from the other.
The evening was in the hands of our very capable quiz master, Charanpreet Singh, fondly known as CP.
Eight teams were formed. We had two family teams and the rest were all mixed teams where individual participants came together to form a team. Each team selected very interesting names for their team – representing perhaps the ethos for their teams - Flying Dutchman, Thinkers, Smarties, Nutties, Eagles, Infinite, Fun times, Still Figuring.
The audience seats filled up as the rules for the evening were shared. With the first question, we were off for an evening of brain ticking quizzing. Questions were thought provoking, several had hidden clues and CP expertly guided each team to think through the questions to arrive at the answers. Some questions, following the ‘infinite bounce’ rule, remained unanswered and were opened to the engaged audience who came up with answers. Star-studded ‘Five-Stars’ awaited the audience winners.
Our quiz master, designed the questions to play to the strengths of our contestants – Some Harry Potter, Tiger 3 questions aimed for the younger participants, some musical questions for our DI music lovers, some old Bollywood trivia questions for our old movie buffs. The topics were varied, from geography-based questions about the Niagara Falls, to Hollywood based questions to guessing the speakers from audio clips. Sports, history, literature, general knowledge, common sense, mythology, city trivia – the range was vast.
Thirty-six questions had been planned for the evening, interspersed with some audience questions. There were several ‘guess-who’ questions that had all our minds racing.
Some misses had the participants moaning about how close they were to guessing the correct answer. Participants were quick to catch on to the clues our quiz master shared, and some clever guesses had the audience clapping in appreciation.
There were some interesting DI connection questions:
Did you know that Jhowtala road had been renamed to Fazlul Haq Sarani?
Questions about famous Hockey player Leslie Claudius and Olympian Tennis player Leander Paes had us, DI members feel proud of our association with these outstanding achievers.
Did you know Rabindranath Tagore had once advertised for Bournvita?
Our Quizmaster’s favourite question was –
Of what are there one in Danish two in English and three in Club?
Any guesses? Yes, it’s the number of slices of bread in sandwiches.
By the end of the 36th question we had a tie breaker between Flying Dutchman and Nutties, with both teams at 80 points each. The tie-breaker question had The Flying Dutchman win. Team Infinite was a close third, scoring 60 points.
It was now time for prizes. Rajashree Kundalia, Secretary DI, invited expert quizzers Shouvik, Barry and Vikas to come up and give away the prizes along with Jayajit Biswas, President DI. The prizes consisted of the coveted tin-n-bottle hamper along with prizes from our generous sponsors ITC and Starmark.
First - The Flying Dutchman, a family team comprising of Jashodhara, Prasenjit, Shaon and Nishan.
Second – Nutties – Jayden, Siddharth, Sandhya, Anand and Brett.
Third – Infinite - Hamza, Ruchi, Nalini, Satvik
A vote of thanks along with a token of appreciation was given to our expert quizmaster CP. This enriching session had been arranged by the Cultural sub-committee. Sincere thanks to the sub-committee and supporters, including CP, Vikas, Debjani, Lorraine, Tanya, Zeenat, Raju and Aritra “Ruru” on the laptop, who helped make this evening a memorable one. Thanks to Sulagna Mukhopadhyay, Samarjit and Roshan for the photographs.
The evening concluded with some snacks, tea and coffee for the participants. It had been a riveting evening, and we look forward to more such enriching sessions.
[Editorial Note: The Family Quiz tradition was revived by the singular efforts of Vikas Khandelwal who approached all our sponsors, the quizmaster, the teams and even the audience to make sure it went off well!]
