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