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