10Q (December 31, 2017)

[For most of the images, larger versions can be viewed by clicking on them]

1. A writer, journalist, photographer, filmmaker and graphic designer who has been associated with various people's movements since 1990, Sonia Jabbar took over this family business a few years ago, and has been trying to revitalise its image using innovative marketing and promotion initiatives such as this sort of commemorative mug. What business, whose name has been part of the social, economic and political discourse of the country for the last 40-odd years?

2. Psalm 58 of the Bible has a reference to an ancient belief that this snake (the only venomous snake in the UK, if that helps) is able to stop up its ears to avoid hearing the snake charmer called in to drive it away. This belief gave rise to what four-word phrase?

3. This is a photograph of the Hollywood Ten waiting to be fingerprinted in the US Marshal's office in November 1947. Who were the Hollywood Ten? [A broad explanation will do, no names required.]

4. One of van Gogh's favoured pigments was Indian yellow, a transparent pigment with an element of fluorescence used in oil painting. Likely first used by Dutch artists, its origin was unknown until an investigation in the year 1883. The method of production, reported by a Mr. T.N. Mukharji of Calcutta who claimed to have studied the process in Bihar, was found to be inhumane and was outlawed in 1908. From what was Indian yellow made?

5. The Khoisan people are an aboriginal people of southern Africa who have lived there for millennia. By what name, now considered derogatory, did  European colonialist settlers refer to them?

6. This is a scene from the 1959 German adventure drama film 'The Indian Tomb' ('Das Indische Grabmal' in the original German), based on Thea von Harbou's novel of the same name. Who directed the film?

If you have any problem viewing the YouTube video above, you can access the clip here.

7. Who said this about his recent (October 2017) book: "...we as individuals are dealing with change all the time, and we're hitting refresh -- we learn from it. The same is true for organizations, and the same is true for our society."

8. This English word, a variant of the Italian word for 'baby'; first came up in early 20th-century American theatre dialogue. It originally referred to a stupid, inconsequential man, but soon switched sexes. In 1920, composer Frank Crumit recorded "My Little _____ Down on the Bamboo Isle", in which the term is used to describe an island girl of questionable virtue. What's the bad word?

9. The term used for this method of differentiating bacterial species into two large groups comes not from a unit of measurement or a type of food ingredient, but from the surname of Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian [X], who developed the technique. What is [X]?

10. In his journal, the best-known denizen of the shore of this water body philosophised upon the wintry sight of Frederic Tudor's men at work on it: "The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well ... The pure ______ water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges." (a) Name the water body (b) Who wrote these lines? (c) What were Tudor's men doing?

Answers

1. The Nuxalbari Tea Estate (where the Naxalite movement started)

2. Deaf as an adder

3. They were the victims of the first systematic Hollywood blacklist.

On November 25, 1947, the day after these ten writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to give testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a group of studio executives, acting under the aegis of the Motion Picture Association of America, announced the firing of the artists. The blacklist was effectively broken in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo, an unrepentant member of the Hollywood Ten, was publicly acknowledged as the screenwriter of the films 'Spartacus' and 'Exodus'.

4. The urine of cattle fed only on mango leaves and water. 

The urine would be collected and dried, producing foul-smelling hard dirty yellow balls of the raw pigment. The process was outlawed as the cows were extremely undernourished, partly because the leaves contain the toxin urushiol which is also found in poison ivy.

5. Bushmen

6. Fritz Lang

7. Satya Nadella

8. Bimbo

9. Gram

10. (a) Walden Pond (b) Henry David Thoreau (c) Harvesting ice to send around the world, including to India. Tudor was known as the Ice King.