Quizzing
From www.hserus.net
I have been quizzing since I was in Kindergarten. The first quiz I attended was conducted by the inimitable Uncle Pai (Ananth Pai of IBH). Uncle Pai publishes two of my favorite magazines - Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle. These, by the way, are not your run of the mill comics - they are treasure troves of information which help you learn everything from Indian history and myth to, literally, rocket science and nuclear physics - and enjoy yourself at the same time.
After this, I went through the usual school quizzing circuit (in Hyderabad, as a member of the Gitanjali School quiz team) and later, college quizzes when I was in Wesley College, muddling my way through a B.Sc, and Vivekananda School of Management, where I completed an MBA majoring in HR (and spent most of my time participating in one business quiz after the other).
Since 1996, I've been a member of K-Circle, one of the oldest quiz clubs in India. Since 1998, I've also been its webmaster. We at K-Circle meet every friday evening at the YMCA Secunderabad for a two hour long quiz session, and I post at least ten questions selected from the quiz within a few hours of reaching home from K-Circle.
Or rather, I used to post the quiz within a few hours of coming back from KC. Since July 2000, thanks to a career move which took me first to Bangalore, and another move in 2001 which pushed me into Hong Kong and then to Madras in 2002, the site started getting updated a lot slower. All I do these days that's KC related is to host their website. There's a new, young and enthusiastic bunch of people at KC and they're taking a renewed interest in the website, and substantially revamping it, so things should get a bit easier.
I was on the research team for Siddhartha Basu's Mastermind India quiz on the BBC. I was also a participant in the first edition (1997) of Mastermind India.
I also used to write regular quiz columns for The Economic Times and CafeMumbai, a Bombay oriented portal run by the ICICI group. Sadly, no time for that now. These days, time (and frequent traveling) permitting, I attend the QFI Chennai quizzes, held twice a month in the IIT-M campus.
