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