10Q (Apr 3, 2024)

1. The Portuguese word for 'stolen' is also a Goan surname, and the surname of this Canadian singer born of Portuguese parents [pic below]. Coincidentally, it also forms the name of India's biggest retailer of musical instruments, which has an outlet in Panjim. Name the singer you see below. [Half point if you get only the surname, a full point for the full name.]

2. The word / name in the question above originates from a Latin word for 'thief', which also gives rise to:
(a) an English adjective for someone acting in a secretive or guilty manner; and
(b) the English name for an animal from the family Mustelidae, which includes weasels, stoats, badgers, otters, martens, and wolverines.
What are (a) and (b)?

3. The Venezuelan city of Ciudad Bolivar used, till 1846, to be named [X], which gave its name to the Congress of [X] (1819), the [X] tree, and the House of [X], which is the maker of one of the most famous accompaniments to alcoholic drinks. What is [X]?

4. The title story of the anthology whose cover you see below formed the basis of which 2000 Bollywood movie, that was the debut film of two scions of famous Hindi film families?

5. In its native Swiss German, the word [A] meant 'knock' or 'thrust'. Its use in English grew during the reporting of the tumultuous Kapp [A] of 1920, in which Wolfgang Kapp and his right-wing supporters attempted to overthrow the German Weimar government. What's the word [A], that lends itself to punny headlines such as "When [A] comes to shove" and "One last [A]"? The correct spelling is important.

6. In 2019, Sri Lankan author and illustrator Sybil Wettasinghe enlisted the help of students from all across the country to contribute writings, drawings and poetry to complete the story in her new book, 'Wonder Crystal'. The outcome of that effort resulted in what world record for the novel, recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2020?

7. While performing religious rituals in the Panchganga River in October 1899, Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj of the princely state of Kolhapur noticed that the priests were not chanting mantras from the Vedas, but from the Puranas. The explanation given for this by the priests left such a mark on Shahu that it spurred the young Chhatrapati to action in a related aspect, leading to what first in India being introduced in Kolhapur in 1902?

8. This book [cover below] – the result of the authors' travels in the region in 1938 – was a personal recounting of which war, that began on July 7, 1937, with 'the Marco Polo Bridge incident', and was later subsumed into World War 2?

9. Signed by King Kalâkaua under threat of violence (and therefore known as the Bayonet Constitution), the 1887 Constitution adopted in 1877 in which Kingdom stripped the king of much of his authority, and introduced a property qualification for voting, which disenfranchised most locals and immigrant labourers, and favored the wealthier white settler community? It was the first step in the annexation of that Kingdom into its coloniser nation in 1898.

10. This statue [pic below] in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, is of someone born in that city in 1876, whose life saw a sea change at the age of 18, after she answered an advertisement in a Dutch newspaper placed by Dutch Colonial Army Captain Rudolf MacLeod who was living in the then Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and was looking for a wife. Who is it? You can give either her real name or the one we are more familiar with.

 

Answers
1. Nelly Furtado
2. (a) Furtive
(b) Ferret
3. Angostura

4. 'Refugee'

5. Putsch
6. Book with most alternative endings (it has 1,250 possible endings)
7. First caste-based job reservations in India. The priests had explained that only brahmins had the right to perform ‘Vedokta’ rituals and since Marathas were ‘shudras’, they could perform rituals only from the Puranas. The administrative order of 1902, decreed by Shahu, brought in reservations in government jobs for backward castes.
8. Sino-Japanese War
9. Kingdom of Hawaii
10. Mata Hari

10Q (Mar 20, 2024)

1. The right-wing historian P.N. Oak (1917-2007) was well known for his crackpot theories, which the RW world loves to repeat and amplify. From his mind arose such gems as that the Taj Mahal is actually a Shiva temple called Tejo Mahalaya, that the word 'Christianity' came from the Sanskrit words 'Krishna-neeti', and that the name 'Abraham' comes from 'Brahma'. In the same vein, he proposed that this placename comes from the Sanskrit for 'garden' or 'grove', whereas it is actually likely to have originated from the name of a Roman deity thought to endow infants with the capacity for speech, evidenced by their first wail (the technical term for which is rooted in the same deity's name). What place am I referring to?

2. Located in Guildford, Surrey, in the UK, where the book's author spent his last years and is buried, the sculpture shown below – created by local sculptor Edwin Russell in 1984 – depicts the opening scene from which 1865 book?

3. Talking about books, a roman à clef is a novel in which real persons or actual events are presented in a disguised version. The genre gets its name from the fact that early booksof the type sometimes included a list matching fictional characters with their real-life counterparts, that helped readers recognize the players. The term roman à clef accordingly translates to 'novel with a ___'. What small word fills the blank?

4. The clergyman educator in the image below only had a short stint in India, but there are well-known schools named after him in Shimla, Bangalore and Nagpur. Having been put in charge of the diocese at Calcutta, he moved there from Britain in 1858, and established a number of schools that brought British-style education to India. On 6th October, 1866, he had consecrated a cemetery at Kushtia on the Ganges, and was crossing a plank leading from the bank to the steamer when he slipped and fell into the river. He was carried away by the current and never seen again. Name him (a religious title and surname will do).

5. Penateka Comanche chief Tosahwi (c. 1805/10 – c.1878/80, pictured below) engaged in many raids in the American Southwest in the 1860s, but in 1867-68 became the first Comanche leader to surrender to the US military, at Fort Cobb in the Indian Territory. Tosahwi reputedly told General Philip Sheridan, "Me Tosahwi. Me good Indian," to which Sheridan supposedly replied, "The only good Indians I ever saw were ____." This led to the coining of a derogatory racist slogan that was resurrected during the Vietnam War as "The only good red is one that's ____". Fill in the blank (single word).

6. This spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, it is the westernmost town of the country, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands. In World War 2, it was the first German city to be captured by the Allies. Its French name is Aix-la-Chapelle; the German name places it at or near the top of alphabetical lists of cities of the world. What's that name?

7. Obviously, this term in the military context has nothing to do with either cricket or superheroes. Instead, it traces its roots back to the Late Latin 'bastum', meaning 'packsaddle', as it originally referred to a soldier in charge of a horse that carried the packsaddle with the officer's kit during a campaign. What 6-letter word is this?

8. The largest air base in Asia, it is an Indian Air Force base under the Western Air Command. It is the home of the C-17 Globemaster, the backbone of Heavy Air Lift division of the IAF. Since the Union Government opened a civil enclave in its space in 2019, allowing commercial flights, it has been under a legal cloud as it violates earlier directives vis-a-vis the operational territory of Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport. Named after a river in the vicinity, what airport with the IATA code HDO is this?

9. The Portuguese word for people of mixed European and Amerindian descent in South America derives from an Arabic word for 'slave' which is used for a dynasty that ruled the Delhi Sultanate from 1206 to 1290. Give me either word.

10. The sovereignty of nations has been a subject of much chest-beating in recent years. What's a related word for a political status where a region or people constitutes a tributary to a more powerful entity that controls its foreign affairs while allowing the tributary vassal state some limited domestic autonomy? The term was originally used to describe the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its surrounding regions.

Answers
1. Vatican, perhaps from Vagitanus (a baby's first cry is called a vagitus); Oak proposed 'vatika' as the root word
2. 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland'
3. Key
4. Bishop Cotton
5. Dead
6. Aachen
7. Batman
8. Hindon (or Hindan)
9. Mameluco / Mamluk
10. Suzerainty

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.

Answers
1. Portugal
2. Shape Shifting Box
3. SOTI
4. Centurion
5. Kiss
6. Fireflies

7. Chatelaine
8. Wayne (will accept Kyle)

9. Chaitya
10. 'The Handmaid's Tale'

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

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

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

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'