Tuesday, March 12, 2024

10Q (Mar 12, 2024)

1. Formed in 2019 by Andre Ventura, a guy who likes to make the Nazi salute, a right-wing populist party named Chega (meaning 'Enough') won 48 out of 230 seats in the legislature of which country in election results declared on March 11, 2024? That was four times the 12 seats they won during the previous elections in 2022!

2. This new plaything (pic below) is starting to gain a lot of ground on social media and in real life. Called Shashibo, its 36 rare earth magnets allow the cube to be taken apart and re-constituted into 70 different forms. Shashibo is an acronym (by syllables, not letters) whose expansion is pretty much a description of the toy. What does Shashibo expand to?

3. The map below gives you the global office distribution of what 'enterprise mobility solutions' company founded and headed by a man of Goan origin, Carl Rodrigues?



4. 1904-1967: Lyttelton Township
1967-1995: Verwoerdburg
1995-present: what name derived from the name of a cricket ground?

5. The End of the Road World Tour, which began on January 31, 2019, in Vancouver, Canada and concluded on December 2, 2023 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, was the final concert tour by the American rock band [X]. It has also been referred to as 'One Last [X]'. Which band? 

6. The event being promoted by the poster below is held annually in the locations and around the times mentioned on it. What is the word blanked out, which refers to a family of creatures called Lampyridae?

7. The word used for the object you see at this Victorian woman's waist – a decorative clasp or hook from which chains holding a watch, purse, keys, etc. were suspended – is a word referring to the lady of the manor (who would generally be in charge of the keys to the household, its petty finances, timetables, etc. What is the 10-letter word, derived directly from the French?



8. Known as the Huntress, this DC Comics character's 'real' name is Helena [X]. In an alternative universe established in the early 1960s and referred to as 'Earth-Two', she is the daughter of a superhero and his enemy-turned-ally lover. What is [X]?

9. A candi (pronounced [tʃandi]) is a Hindu or Buddhist temple in Indonesia. In Thailand a Buddhist stupa is called a chedi. Both these terms are reckoned to have evolved from what Sanskrit term for a hall within a stupa (or the stupa itself) such as the one shown below, which is at Bhaja Caves near Pune?

10. Below are two versions of the flag of Gilead, an autocratic religious nation, that appear in the television adaptation of a famous 1985 novel. The first one is seen while the story is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the second, more fascistic one appears after the narrative shifts to Washington DC. Name the novel.



Thursday, March 7, 2024

10Q (Mar 7, 2024)

1. What place name with religious connotations – also a surname in some places, including here in Goa – comes from a Hebrew word meaning 'to guard', and is likely cognate with an Arabic / Urdu word related to keeping watch?

2. In 'Little Girl Lost' (1990), a memoir that she wrote when she was just 15 years old, [X] says: “I had my first drink at age nine, began smoking marijuana at 10, and at 12 took up cocaine.” Who is [X]?

3. Deriving from the Italian 'macchietta', meaning 'sketch', and ultimately from Latin 'macula', meaning 'spot', what is a maquette, created by architects and sculptors during the course of their work?

4. Launched by the Kerala government in 1997, this flagship initiative is billed as the largest women’s network in the world, with 4.58 million members across 306,551 neighbourhood groups. What is the name of the programme, whose logo is shown below?

 
5. Whose statue is this?

6. Started as a regional air-charter company called Tradewinds Charters in 1975 and operational until 2021, this was a wholly-owned subsidiary and regional carrier of which airline?

7.  In March 2023, the Bangla Sahitya Sabha (BSS), a newly formed literary body in Assam, organised its first-ever state-level conference in Guwahati. The organisers felicitated their guests and delegates with a unique piece of cloth – stitching together a revered cultural symbol of the Assamese with its Bengali counterpart. Though their intentions were perhaps good, what that led them down was the path to hell. The images from the event set off a storm, with many in Assam terming the attempted fusion an “insult” to Assamese society. Civil society groups paraded effigies of the state’s culture minister. Apart from street protests, high-voltage television debates, and impassioned social media commentary, a flurry of police complaints were regsitered across the state against the BSS. Look at a couple of pix from the event, and give me the name of the Assamese symbol or its Bengali equivalent.

8. Also back in 2023, to mark his company's 50th anniversary, Yvon Chouinard, the man in the photos (today, and many years ago) announced that the company had restructured, with the Chouinards ceding control to two private entities: a trust that owns all voting stock and a non-profit called the Holdfast Collective that owns all non-voting stock and oversees the firm's environmental work, which is set to expand sharply. In other words, the family voluntarily gave away the company, primarily to fight climate change. The company has for years donated 1 percent of its sales to environmental causes, but this shift will increase that figure dramatically. Name the company, whose logo can be seen at the bottom of the composite visual below.

9. The photo on top in the collage below shows a greenhouse in Izmir, Turkey, where they are growing a plant known locally as Ataturk’s Flower (bottom left), because the nation’s founder was very fond of it, and encouraged it to be grown all over the country. What is its more universal name, derived from that of the botanist in the third image, who was incidentally also the first US Minister to Mexico?


10. Asrar Ahmad (1928-1980) was a prolific Pakistani writer of detective fiction in Urdu, who found generations of adoring fans on both sidesof the Indo-Pak border for his Jasoosi Dunya detectives Fareedi and Hameed (125 books), and for Imran of the eponymous Imran Series (120 books). Ahmad wrote his books under a pseudonym that literally means 'Son of Righteousness'. What pseudonym?

 

Answers
1. Nazareth
2. Drew Barrymore

3. A small preliminary model
4. Kudumbashree
5. Dom Pérignon

6. Singapore Airlines
7. Gamosa/gamchha
8. Patagonia

9. Poinsettia
10. Ibne Safi






Friday, March 1, 2024

10Q (Mar 1, 2024)

1. In ancient Rome, voting at legal assemblies was done by group, with the majority in a group determining its vote. The group chosen to vote first on an issue was called the '____________', a term that roughly means 'those asked for an opinion before others'. Because the first vote was considered to be of great importance, Latin speakers also used the noun to mean 'preference' and later 'privilege'. Cognate with another word related to questioning, what is the English word that arose from this background?

2. The screenshot below is from the Website of a digital publication headquartered out of Bangalore, launched by Rohin Dharmakumar, Seema Singh, Sumanth Raghavendra and Ashish Mishra in 2016 as a premium subscriber-only platform. According to their Website, the name is "defined as one's range of knowledge or understanding. Nothing to do with Barbie." What's it called?

3. Its spelling and pronunciation seeming in English to indicate some thievery involved, this traditional German Christmas bread has a rich history that includes a special permission called 'the Butter Letter' to bakers in Saxony from the 15th-century Pope Innocent VIII. Name this food item, supposed to represent the baby Christ in his swaddling clothes.

4. The English parson in the first image below – an enthusiastic fox-hunter and dog breeder, and a founding member of The Kennel Club of Great Britain – shares his 2-word name with the artist in the second pic, who was more famous in a different avatar in the late 1980s and '90s. And they both share that name with something that the former helped develop from a single specimen called, of all things, Trump. What name?


5. This is the Namak Haram Deori or 'Traitor’s Gate' in Murshidabad in West Bengal. Whose estate lay beyond it in the 18th century? It's now split up amongst his descendants.

 
 
6. What's the punny 2-word caption to this cartoon? Spellings are important. Also, name the work parodied in the text, and its author.
 

7. A country, at the time called AB, was given its current name XY on August 4, 1984. The words X and Y stem from different local languages: X comes from Mossi and is meant to show how the people are proud of their integrity, while Y comes from the Dioula language and means 'fatherland' (literally, 'father's house'). A 2-letter suffix is added to X to form the demonym Z. Give me AB, XY, and Z.

8. A story told about the boy in the picture below – to perhaps underline his general acumen – is that he learned typing during the ten days he spent on a Japanese boat while coming back to India in 1918. Who is this, dressed in traditional Japanese attire with his sister Sylla, around 1917?


9. What word in English, also used as the name of an advanced military weapon, comes from a Virginia Algonquian word meaning 'he cuts'?

10. This image from the travelogues of French writer René Augustin Constantin Renneville, published in Amsterdam in 1754, shows a town known as Gimhathiththa before the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century, when it was the main port in the region. It lies on the banks of the evocatively-named Gin Ganga. According to some writers, it was the ancient seaport of Tarshish, from which King Solomon drew ivory, peacocks and other valuables. What is it called today?

 

Answers
1. Prerogative
, from 'praerogativa' (the 'questioning' word being 'interrogate')
2. 'The Ken'
3. Stollen
4. Jack Russell
– the artist is the former England wicket-keeper of that name; and Trump was the progenitor of the Jack Russell Terrier breed, named after his owner
5. Mir Jafar
, the commander-in-chief of Siraj-ud-Daulah's army, who betrayed him to Robert Clive, leading to the fall of Bengal (and eventually all of India) to the East India Company
6. Beet Poet; 'Howl'
by Allen Ginsberg
7. AB: Upper Volta, XY: Burkina Faso, Z: Burkinabe
8. J.R.D. Tata
9. Tomahawk
, from 'tamahaac'
10. Galle

Monday, February 12, 2024

10Q (Feb 12, 2024)

1. In 19th-century Britain, a 'fawney' was a colloquial word for a finger ring. A confidence game called the 'fawney rig' developed that involved the con artists dropping what looked like a golden ring on the street, and rushing to pick it up the moment a bystander went for it. They would then offer to keep the ring in exchange for half of what they could get from it. Some marks would take this to indicate that the object was a valuable one, and would instead bargain for it at a price. Money having changed hands, the conman would vamoose, and the poor sap who took the ring would later find out that it was just brass. What common word in English has its roots in the 'fawney rig'?

2. The vertical picture at left in the composite below shows kuzhi paniyaram (close-up at top right) being prepared in Tamil Nadu in a specialised cast iron pan. The photo at bottom right is of an European breakfast item called poffertjes. Which colonial power brought the poffertjes pan used for making these mini pancakes to India, and left it behind to be adapted into a paniyaram pan?


3. Shot from an unusual perspective, what is the picture below a photo of?

4. Shown below is a Bouguer [X] anomaly map, showing variations in [X] around the earth. Positive anomalies occur in areas coloured red. Negative anomalies are found in areas coloured blue.The anomaly is named after French scientist Pierre Bouguer (1698-1758), a prodigy who became a professor of hydrography at the age of 16. Among his many discoveries was the fact that small regional variations in [X] could be related to the varying density of subterraneous rocks in the subsurface. What is [X]? Also, what is the unit 'gal' a shortening of?

5. The surname of this Goan artist comes from the Portuguese word for 'mosque' For half a point, give me that word; for full points tell me the artist's full name.


6. The actor Milla Jovovich, fluent in four laguages, helped director Luc Besson develop the Divine Language that her character Leeloo speaks in this 1997 sci-fi movie. To get the character to sound natural when speaking it, Besson and Jovovich would hold conversations and write letters to each in the language as practice. Which movie?

7. The photo below is of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of [X], aka Lord [X], who was Secretary of State for India in 1866-67 and again from 1874 to 1878. He went on to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, holding that position for three stints between 1885 and 1902. A city founded in 1890 in what was at the time one of Britain's African colonies was named Fort [X] after him. In the 1920s, later the name was shorted to just [X] and the city became the capital of the colonial country. In 1982, on the second annivasary of the country's independence from the UK, it was renamed [Y]. What are [X] and [Y]?

8. The meme below purports to be the origin story of what 3-word Hindi phrase, which is the chorus line of a song from 'Soorma', the 2018 biopic of hockey player Sunny Singh?

9. The rule articulated in this 1985 episode of the weekly comic strip 'Dykes to Watch Out For' are commemorated as what 'test' named after the strip's creator?

10. The last sailing ship to serve as a flagship of the Royal Navy, this vessel was launched in November 1821 at Bombay Dockyard and named HMS ______ after an Indian river. Fill in the blank.


Answers
1. Phony
2. The Dutch
3. The Guggenheim Museum
atrium
4. Gravity, Galileo
5. Ted Misquita
(the Portuguese word can also be spelt 'mesquita')
6. The Fifth Element

7. Salisbury > Harare
8. Goodman di laaltein
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNhpBpLGyAE)
9. Bechdel test
, after Alison Bechdel
10. HMS Ganges

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

10Q (Feb 6, 2024)

1. What word – German for 'compulsion to move', and one of the last words in any English dictionary – is generally used in the context of chess and other games?

2. Sling ____ and port ____ are the two main acceptable ways of carrying what? Both blanks are the same word.

3. Shown in the composite image above is the logo of the oldest existing club football tournament in Asia, and the person who it is named after, who started it in 1888 while recuperating from illness in Shimla. Name the tournament.

4. Frank Welker, who voiced the monkey in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvF3eAYSGfs), also did the sounds for which monkey in a 1999 Hollywood movie?

5. Which organisation's headquarters is this, and in which city would you find it? [1 point each]

6. The name of what creature, also called a 'shark sucker' or 'suckerfish', comes from the word for 'delay' in Latin, because ancient sailors believed they had the power to slow or even stop a ship by attaching themselves to it?

7. When this book was chosen in November 2001 as Book of the Month by Oprah Winfrey – only her second non-American book choice after Bernhard Schlink's 'The Reader' – its publisher Knopf printed an extra 700,000 copies, half a million of which sold. Though this lesson on educational site Vallath places the book as 'Canadian literature', in most other mentions, it would be classified in Indian writing in English. Using the visual as a clue, name the book (which was also in the 1996 Booker Prize shortlist) and its author. [1 point each]

8. What food item popular in Goa and originating in the Iberian peninsula, has a Filipino version flavoured with indigenous spices called the longaniza?

9. American writer H.L. Mencken, complaining of the tepidity of the American vocabulary of profanity, wrote about this sometimes hyphenated 4-word term that "is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art that is one of their great glories." What is the term?

10. Depicted on this currency note are poet Banjo Paterson and elements from his poem “The Man From Snowy River". The poem was also commemorated in two films, a silent black-and-white version released in 1920, and an award-winning 1982 drama, which held the title of the most popular film of all time from its country [X] until the release of [Y] in 1986. Which country [X], and what movie [Y], that remains to this day the highest-grossing movie from that country? [1 point each]

Answers
1. Zugzwang
2. Firearms

3. Durand Cup, named after Sir Henry Mortimer Durand
4. Abu
in 'Alladin' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7GVxPpR-n8)
5. NATO HQ
in Brussels

6. Remora
7. 'A Fine Balance'
by Rohinton Mistry

8. Chouriço
9. Son-of-a-gun
10. Australia, 'Crocodile Dundee'

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

10Q (Jan 30, 2024)

1. Tannenbaum is the German word for a fir tree. Knowing that, what is the title of the well-known English translation of the song "O Tannenbaum", written in 1824 by organist, teacher and composer Ernst Anschütz?

2. And, during World War 2, Operation Tannenbaum was the planned but never carried-out invasion of which country by Nazi Germany?

3. As part of its marketing strategy, Amar Chitra Katha has been selling collections of its comics as thematic packs, such as the five Elements of Nature packs shown in the visual below, each with its own theme. Apart from titles related to Fire, Water, Wind and Earth, what is the name of the 5th pack, which is an anagram of one of the other packs? [Clue: it's not strictly speaking an 'Element of Nature'.]



4. In Persian, 'hamazakaran' is a term that means 'to make war'. The related Persian word for 'warriors' is cited as one of the possible origins for an English word that has traversed a long route from Greek mythology through geography to commerce. The folk etymology that links it to an amputation story is specious, as there is no indication in Greek art of such a practice. What's the English word?

5.  Talking about warriors, by what 2-word term do we better know the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, a religious military order that existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.

6. Forged by the dwarven brothers Sindri and Brokkr, its characteristically short handle was due to a mishap during its manufacture. What object whose name is usually interpreted as meaning "that which smashes" was this? It's become widely known over the past 15 years because of a popular Hollywood film franchise.

7. This is a historical novel about Rani Jindan, one of the minor wives of an influential 19th-century Indian ruler, who gained prominence after his death in 1839, largely through her efforts to sustain a princely legacy for her son Duleep Singh. Which Maharaja was she the 'last queen' of?

8.  This 4-letter adjective, defined by Merriam-Webster as "very eccentric or absurd, often in an amusing way", came into English as a noun word for a theatrical buffoon. That was rooted in a stock servant character in the Italian commedia dell’arte. The Italian name for the character – from which the English word arose – was a colloquial shortening of the Italian form of the name John. What's the English word?

9. Hugely popular in the US after their path-breaking feats in the late 1920s and '30s, this couple had a spectacular fall from grace in the lead-up to the Second World War. Invited to inspect the rising power of Nazi Germany's Air Force, the husband was full of praise and admiration, and strongly campaigned against the US getting involved in the war. The wife wrote a booklet titled 'The Wave of the Future', arguing that something resembling fascism was inevitable. The Roosevelt administration attacked 'The Wave of the Future' as "the bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist and Appeaser", and the booklet became one of the most despised writings of the period. She had also written in a letter, of Hitler, that he was "a very great man, like an inspired religious leader – and as such rather fanatical – but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power." Who were the couple? Just the shared surname will do.

10. Fill in the blanks in this verse from 'Paradise Lost: The Fourth Book' by John Milton, which contains a dialogue between Gabriel and Satan. This is the origin of a certain common 4-word phrase in English.

"So judge thou still, presumptuous, till the wrauth,
Which thou incurr’st by flying, meet thy flight
Sevenfold, and scourge that wisdom back to ____,
Which taught thee yet no better that no pain
Can equal anger infinite provoked.
But wherefore thou alone? Wherefore with thee
Came not ___ ____ _____ ____? Is pain to them
Less pain, less to be fled? or thou than they
Less hardy to endure? Courageous chief,
The first in flight from pain, hadst thou alleged
To thy deserted host this cause of flight,
Thou surely hadst not come sole fugitive.”

The blank at the end of the 3rd line is the second word in the missing phrase.

 

Answers

1. "O Christmas Tree": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLdqnICsS8
Here's the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xww_oaafCBA

2. Switzerland
3. Heart

4. Amazon, from 'ha-mazan'
5. Knights Templar
6. Mjolnir
, the hammer of Thor
7. Maharaja Ranjit Singh
of Punjab
8. Zany
, from 'zanni', short for Giovanni
9.
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh
10. All Hell broke loose

Sunday, January 21, 2024

10Q (Jan 21, 2024)

1. Shown below are a satellite image of Guanabara Bay and an early 20th-century picture of a city on its banks. The bay was first encountered by Europeans on January 1, 1502, when the Portuguese explorers Gaspar de Lemos and Gonçalo Coelho arrived on its shores. The name given by the exploration team to the bay originally used the Portuguese word for lagoon as part of the name of the bay, but some confusion in spelling led to it being called a river instead. The resulting name of the bay was later also given to the city on its shore. What is it called?


2. Watch this title sequence of a children's TV series very popular in the 1990s, and name the singer.

3. Formerly part of Hyderabad Division in the province of Sindh, the division in red below was renamed Shaheed _______abad District in 2008, on the demand of most of the Members of the Provincial Assembly. Whose first name fills the blank?

 
4. In Greek, 'ateleia' is a word used for, among other things, 'tax exemption'. In the 1860s, Frenchman George Herpin combined this with a Greek prefix to come up with what word for something he loved doing?

5. This is a plaque outside a building called Blavatsky House in Mumbai. Which organisation's 'Three Objects' are listed on it?

6. Which toy brand's mascot Murph is this?

7. In medieval Japan, a Tessen was a disguised weapon that samurai could take into places where swords or other overt weapons were not allowed. Apart from as a weapon of offence, it was also used for fending off arrows and darts, as a throwing weapon, and as an aid in swimming. What everyday object was the Tessen a variation of?

In the following 2 questions, use the letters (a), (b), (c) to identify your answers 

8. (a) What word has been blanked out in the Amul Topical shown below? (b) What popular TV show is the subject of this ad?


9. Three parts to this question.
Who (a: with the red headdress) is shown guiding whom (b: in the brown robes) through Hell in this 1822 painting by the French painter (c)?

10. Give me a 2-word term that connects the 3 visuals below.



Answers
1. Rio de Janeiro (January River, because of the date of discovery)
2. Amit Kumar 
3. Benazir Bhutto (the division is now called Benazirabad) 
4. Philately – Herpin loved collecting stamps, which were a new invention at the time
 

5. Theosophical Society
 
6. Nerf – he's made up of the darts shot from a Nerf gun
 
7. A fan – the tessen is an iron-reinforced war fan, sometimes incorporating sharp metals tips and throwing knives
 
8. Oven, 'Made in Heaven'
9. (a) Virgil (b) Dante (c) Eugène Delacroix 
10. Round Table – Algonquin Round Table, Knights of the Round Table, Round Table India