10Q (March 24, 2018)

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1. John William Hessing was a soldier from the Netherlands, initially in the employ of the Dutch East India Company in Ceylon. After the British overpowered the Dutch in 1781 and annexed all their sub-continental holdings, Colonel Hessing continued the fight as a mercenary, first in the employ of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and later the Marathas. He was rewarded with the prestigious command of the Agra Fort, which he retained for almost two decades, dying in battle on 21 July, 1803 defending the fort against the British. In commemoration, his wife Ann reversed the story of a then 170-year-old labour of love, and built him a tomb of red sandstone which has come to be known as the Red [X], less than 10km from the original [X]. What is [X]?

2. Which French poet, whom Victor Hugo described as "an infant Shakespeare", produced his best known works while still in his late teens, and gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21? He is seen seated second from left in this 1872 painting, with his lover Paul Verlaine at extreme left.

3. [Y] Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated among chemists on October 23, between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM, making the date 6:02 10/23 in the American style of writing dates. What is [Y], also the name of a creature of the Talpidae family?

4. This vehicle was originally called a [Z] Hanseat, a brand belonging to the German company Oscar Vidal und Sohn [Z]-Werk GmbH. Three-wheeled trucks, vans and the curious soft-top passenger taxi you see in the second image were manufactured in India under license by Bajaj-[Z] from 1960 until 2000. In Madhya Pradesh, it is affectionately called a bhatsuar – a 'stuttering mechanical pig'. The name [Z] has since disappeared in Germany, but is still a generic term in India, for small transport vehicles. What is [Z]?

5. In the printing and typesetting industry, this is a two-word term for dummy text. It has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing _____ _____ passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like PageMaker including versions of this dummy text. The term comes from the following lines in 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' ('The Extremes of Good and Evil') by Cicero, written in 45 BC, a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance: "Neque porro quisquam est qui _______ _____ quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." ("There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."). What is the term?

6. The ancient Chaldean word 'Gizbar', which means 'treasurer', has led to a number of names in European languages, including the Dutch Jasper and the Danish Jesper. Give me two of these derivatives – [A], which one would associate with a convivial supernatural entity; and [B], the name of a nobleman after whom a fort that once stood in the Miramar area of Panjim was named.

7. Who is this, reciting his own translations of whose poetry? [Two answers required]
[Audio clip]

8. While working in the postal service of the Council of Europe in the 1950s, Arsène Heitz, an Austrian draughtsman submitted 21 of the 101 designs for [C] that are conserved in the Council of Europe Archives. One of these designs, inspired by the twelve-star halo of the Virgin Mary, often portrayed in Roman Catholic art,  was the one finally chosen. In 2002, Dutch architect [D] and his architecture firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) suggested a new design in response to Commission President Romano Prodi's request to find ways of rebranding the European Union in a way that represents Europe's "diversity and unity". The proposed new design, shown here, was dubbed the [E], and has also been compared unfavourably to wallpaper, a TV test card and deckchair fabric. What are [C], [D], and [E]?

9. Name this dramatic adaptation of the tiatr format, written in English and directed by Sunil Shanbag. Set on a Goan river island in the 1970s, the play is named for the bhatkar's son's Anglo-Indian girlfriend. The play was first staged in Mumbai in April 2016 as part of the Aadyam theatre initiative of the Aditya Birla group.


10. This drug cartel in Mexico was founded by a small group of Mexican Army Special Forces deserters and now includes corrupt former federal, state, and local police officers. The group's name comes from its first leader, Lieutenant Arturo Guzman Decena, whose Federal Judicial Police radio code was "Z1", a code given to high-ranking officers. What are they called, from a Greek / Latin / Spanish word equivalent to the letter 'Z'?

Answers
1. Taj Mahal

2. Arthur Rimbaud
3. Mole
The naming is derived from Avogadro's number, which is approximately 6.02×10^23, defining the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in one mole of substance, one of the seven base SI units.
4. Tempo
5. Lorem Ipsum

6. [A] Casper, [B] Gaspar (Dias)
7. Watch...
Gulzar, Rabindranath Tagore
8. [C] EU flag [D] Rem Koolhaas [E] Barcode
9. 'Loretta'
10. Los Zetas

10Q (March 19, 2018)

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1. You may have heard of Sake Dean Mohamed, the first person to open an Indian restaurant in Britain. While the restaurant didn't work out, in 1814 Mohamed and his Irish wife Jane moved to Brighton and opened a public bath-house, also the first of its kind in England. The bath-house was very popular, and both King George IV and his successor William IV were among the customers. It was billed as a 'health resort', specialising in '_______ing', a word derived from a certain Indian activity. This was hugely successful, and resulted in Mohamed being appointed _______ing Surgeon to both George IV and William IV. What's the blanked-out word (both blanks are the same)?

2. An [X] was the basic tactical unit of the Roman army following the reforms of Gaius Marius in 107 BCE, with a legion consisting of ten [X]s, named the first [X], the second [X] and so on. The first [X] was considered to be the most senior and prestigious, and the tenth the least. Each [X] consisted of six 'centuries' of 80 men.
(a) What is [X], currently also used in scientific, especially biological, contexts?
(b) The [X] sagittaria was a specialised auxiliary unit consisting of what type of soldiers?

3. Watch this video clip.

If you have trouble playing the Youtube video, you can download the clip from here.
This is an age-old form of Hindu religious discourse known as Harikatha or Katha Kalakshepa, popular in Andhra Pradesh, in which Haridasus go around villages singing devotional songs telling the stories of Vishnu. Who, according to Hindu mythology, was the first Harikatha singer?

4. This is Mona E. Simpson (born Mona Jandali, June 14, 1957), a prize-winning American author and professor of English. She is also the biological younger sister of a person whom she first met when she was 25 years old, after he tracked down his birth mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, who had had him out of wedlock in 1955 and given him up for adoption. The siblings developed a close friendship, but kept their relationship secret until 1986, when Simpson introduced her brother at the book party for her first novel, 'Anywhere But Here'. Her first three books, 'Anywhere But Here' (1986), 'The Lost Father' (1992) and 'A Regular Guy' (1996) were based on her mother, father and brother, respectively. Who was her brother?

5. What nine-letter English word borrowed directly from Italian, that is used to refer to a confused, messy situation (as in the titles of these books), shares its origins with a common culinary term meaning 'to roast'?

6. Born in Junagadh in pre-Independence India, he was coached early on by a Gujarati named Jaomal Naomal, and late in life said that he wished Partition had never taken place. He was 16 when he first toured India in 1951-52, celebrating his 17th birthday during the Test series. His precocity impressed Jawaharlal Nehru – who specially asked to be introduced to him in New Delhi – as well as many other Indians, some of whom woke up the Pakistani cricketers at railway stations as they criss-crossed the country, demanding to see the boy wonder. His team-mates were so impressed by this adulation that they nicknamed him 'Dilip', after Dilip Kumar, himself originally from Peshawar and once named Yusuf Khan. Who?

7. Predatory insects of the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula, known simply as wasps in most English-speaking countries, are in North America known by a two-word name based on their distinctive colouring. This name has also been used as the name of multiple superheroes and supervillains, including at least one of each by Marvel Comics. A mutant version also turns up in 'The Hunger Games', in the form of the 'tracker jacker', a genetically mutated species that's lethal due to its repeated stings. Its most visible place in American popular culture is as a mascot, most famously with the Georgia Tech ______ _______ American football team, represented by the mascot Buzz (below). Fill in the blanks.


8. This Hollywood actor comes from a Swedish noble family descended from the cavalry lieutenant Nils Gunnarsson ____, ennobled in 1652 with the addition of the Swedish word for 'Golden' to his surname. In an interview related to the première of the movie 'Prince of Persia' in 2010, the actor jokingly told an interviewer that his last name was pronounced "Yil-en-hoo-luh-hay", poking fun at Americans' difficulties with pronunciation of foreign words. Who? [Need full name for the full point]

9. PCOs in many parts of India are using SIM boxes such as the one shown below to achieve a transformation that is often used by phishing rackets in which people are duped by calls purporting to have been made from their banks. What do these SIM boxes do?

10. This is an extract from "The Sedan Also Rises", a 2015 article about the hunt for a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker belonging to [Z]: "It seems to be one of the few items from [Z]’s entire life that hasn’t been preserved. His birth certificate hangs in his boyhood home in Oak Park, Illinois. His wooden skis adorn the wall of Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West. His childhood scrapbook is searchable online ... Generations after his death, he still attracts pilgrims who follow his footsteps from Petoskey, Michigan to Pamplona, Spain. It’s not his books that inspire lookalikes to sweat on the streets of Key West every summer for his birthday celebration. It’s his image as a man who lived life intensely. For devotees, to sit at his barstool or stand in his study or peek at the 'Pilar' is to touch a little bit of the man. These objects are relics in a shrine." Identify [Z].

Answers
1. Shampoo (from the Hindi 'champi')
2. (a) Cohort (b) Archers
3. Narada 
4. Steve Jobs
5. Imbroglio, cognate with 'broil'
6. Hanif Mohammad
7. Yellow Jacket
8. Jake Gyllenhaal
9. It translates international data calls into voice calls
10. Ernest Hemingway

10Q (March 11, 2018)

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1. La Madone des Motards, known in English as the festival of the Madonna of the [X] (it's a plural word), is promoted as the largest “pilgrimage” of its kind in France. Begun in 1979 by a local abbot as an event for himself and 37 friends, it annually attracts 10,000-plus participants from across Europe to the fields of Porcaro, population 650, in Brittany. What is [X]?

2. In biological studies, 'in vitro' refers to studies or experiments conducted outside the living body and in an artificial environment. In contrast, 'in vivo' refers to studies or experiments that are performed in the living body of a plant or animal. What are experiments conducted 'in silico', a term coined by mathematician Pedro Miramontes in his 1989 report "DNA and RNA Physicochemical Constraints, Cellular Automata and Molecular Evolution"?

3. A former industrialist born and raised in a conservative Hindu family in Burma, S.N. Goenka (photo above) stumbled upon this form of meditation while searching for a ‘cure’ for his migraines. He reached out to local teacher U Ba Khin, who refused him at first, chiding him for looking at an ancient way of meditation for something so mundane. Not to be deterred, Goenka handed over his business to his family, and spent the rest of his life learning and teaching the techniques. In 1969, he came back to India and re-introduced it here (the teaching had been lost over the years) and set up the first meditation centre.
(a) What technique? (b) In which small town in Nashik district in Maharashtra did he set up the first centre?

4. Betta splendens, also known as the betta, is a popular species of freshwater aquarium fish (photo above). The name of the genus is derived from ikan bettah, taken from a Malay dialect. The wild ancestors of this fish are native to the rice paddies of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam and are called pla-kad (meaning 'biting fish') in Thai. Tending to be rather aggressive, they have been used for 'battles' since prior to the 19th century in south-east Asia. Seeing the popularity of these encounters, King Nongklao started licensing and collecting these fish in the 1840s. What common name are they known by in English?

5. Developed for US military use in the late 2000s by a team at Ekso Bionics under a licensing agreement from Lockheed Martin, what kind of device / mode of transport is the Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC?

6. The blurb on this non-fiction book cover is by its author's well-known sister, whose name and description have been blanked out. Name her.

7. Having been forgotten on the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, this tiny principality remained legally at war with Germany till 1958, when it formally 'declared peace'. Which country nestled between two larger nations?

8. A vaquero is a horse-mounted livestock herder of a tradition that originated on the Iberian Peninsula, and remains a part of the doma vaquera, the Spanish tradition of working riding. Vaquero traditions that developed in Mexico from these Spanish antecedents also became the foundation for the North American cowboy. This is reflected in what word for a cowboy, especially one in the California region of the US, that derives from the word 'vaquero'?

9. I was asked this year to be one of the judges for the Publishing Next Award for Cover of the Year. This was one of the designs submitted. Identify the author. [Enlarge the picture to read the author bio.]

10. These are two early-life memoirs of which famous author?


Answers
1. Bikers

2. Biological experiments carried out entirely in a computer simulation
3. (a) Vipassana (b) Igatpuri
4. Siamese fighting fish
Nongklao was King Rama III of the Chakri dynasty, predecessor and half-brother of King Mongkut or Rama IV, whose life was the subject of the book 'Anna and the King of Siam' (also made into a film), and the subsequent musical 'The King and I'.
5. An exoskeleton
It is an un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton, designed to help soldiers in combat carry a load of up to 90 kg at a top speed of 10 miles per hour for extended periods of time.

6. Mindy Kaling, whose real name is Vera Mindy Chokalingam

7. Andorra
8. Buckaroo
9. M. Veerappa Moily
10. Roald Dahl

10Q (March 6, 2018)

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1. According to Sri Lankan legends, when the Buddha died in 543 BCE (or thereabouts), his body was cremated in a sandalwood pyre at Kushinagar, and his left canine tooth was retrieved from the funeral pyre by Arahat Khema, who then gave it to King Brahmadatta for veneration. Brahmadatta kept it in his capital city of Danta____, where it remained for a long while before continuing its journey to its final resting place.
As per Vedic writings, though, the place was originally called Purushamandama-grama meaning the place where the creator deity of the world was deified on a mandapa. Over time the name got changed to Purushottama ____, and later to just ____.
These are alternative explanations of what city name, that is said to be cognate with the Greek 'polis'? (All blanks above are the same.)

2. What object of household use gets its name from the biological genus of these fruit classified in the cucumber (Cucurbitaceae) family, specifically X aegyptiaca and X acutangula?

3. The Swiss corporation Phœbus S.A. Compagnie Industrielle pour le Développement de l'Éclairage (French for Phoebus, Inc. Industrial Company for the Development of Lighting) that existed from 1925 to 1955, was actually a front for a number of companies including Osram, Philips, Tungsram, Associated Electrical Industries, ELIN, Compagnie des Lampes, International General Electric, and the GE Overseas Group,which held shares in the Swiss corporation proportional to their lamp sales. Known after the fatcs came to light as the Phoebus cartel, the group engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence, reduced competition in the light bulb industry, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs. Who in Greek mythology did the cartel take its name from? (In other words, Phoebus, which means 'bright' in Greek, was one of the alternative names for whom?)

4. Apco Worldwide is an American lobby group and PR firm which has, among other 'achievements', run an image-improvement campaign for the US financial industry at the height of its troubles in the early 2010s; helped keep Kazakhstan dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in power; and handled crises as diverse as Merck & Co's scandal involving Vioxx, the arthritis drug that killed thousands before it was withdrawn, and Ford Motor's troubles with Firestone tires on its Explorer vehicles. Its first venture into India in 2007 was for a person who has since used them to great effect, in helping to promote and rebrand a showpiece investor meeting. What name did they come up for the biennial event?

5. The circulation of engravings such as this one were significant contributors to the anti-colonial fervour in America in the 1770s. What event does it depict, and who made the engraving?

6. Listen to this audio clip.
This is from a 2003 reggae version of a famous rock album. The name of the tribute album, produced by Easy Star All-Stars, is the same as that of the original album, but with one key word changed. (a) Name the tribute album.
Included with the liner notes of the tribute are instructions on how to synchronise the album with a 1939 film and produce a variation of the perceived "____ ____ of the Rainbow" effect. (b) Which movie?

7. Incorporated in 1948, it claims to be the largest exporter of viscose rayon fibre in the country, with exports to over 50 countries. It is headquartered in Nagda in Madhya Pradesh, and also has plants at Kharach (Kosamba, Gujarat) and Harihar (Davangere, Karnataka). The company's products include Freedom ("the softest fabric available"), Ice Touch ("fabric which keeps body temperature five degrees cooler"), Uncrushables ("first wrinkle-free polyester viscose fabric"), Venetia ("designs inspired from Italy") and Caramel ("soft, smooth and lightweight fabric"). Name the company, associated for a long time with a beauty pageant.

8. On 16 October 1834, a fire broke out at an historic location, after an overheated stove used to destroy a stockpile of tally sticks set fire to one of its most hallowed chambers. The resulting conflagration destroyed a significant part of the complex. The artist J.M.W. Turner watched the fire from a vantage point, and painted several canvasses depicting it, including the one shown below. (a) What were the buildings involved in the disaster, that were swiftly rebuilt, and ready for use by February the following year?
Immediately after the fire, King William IV offered an almost-completed building as an alternative, hoping to dispose of a residence he disliked. The building was considered unsuitable for the proposed use, however, and the gift was rejected. (b) What building?


9. What reversal of parenting roles occurs in only one species of mammal, the Dayak fruit bat shown here?


10. The record for the maximum ODI centuries on a single cricket ground is seven, achieved by three different batsmen. Ricky Ponting did it at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. On which ground did both Saeed Anwar and Sachin Tendulkar hit seven centuries?

Answers
1. Puri, in Odisha
2. Loofah, from luffa

3. Apollo, god of, among other things, light
4. Vibrant Gujarat (their client being, of course, Narendra Modi)
5. The Boston Massacre, by Paul Revere

6. (a) 'Dub Side of the Moon' (b) 'The Wizard of Oz'
7. Grasim Industries Limited, which has since diversified into building materials and chemicals, and from 1992 to 2012 sponsored the Grasim Mr India competition

8. (a) The British Houses of Parliament at Westminster (b) Buckingham Palace
9. Milk production and nursing is done by the male of the species
10. Sharjah