Siddhartha Basu, aptly described as ‘the father of Indian quizzing’ has another ace up his sleeve. Basu has floated Quizzer of the Year on SonyLIV, an interactive quizzing format aimed at students from grades IX to XII. Basu describes it as “a stimulating year-round engagement where users can play a snap quiz daily and instantly review their performance and ranking”.
Students can not only play and put their knowledge to the test every day but also compete and make their mark in school, zonal and national rankings, culminating in a national play-off for top honours. It is an engagement which is free and open to all, with the intention being to foster the growth of awareness and a factual culture of depth and accuracy. t2 chatted with Basu to know more.
Was there a specific reason that spurred the idea of Quizzer of the Year?
I realised a few years ago that quiz shows on television don’t exist in isolation... they need a 360-degree approach. Today, being able to access a show in the comfort of one’s own time is important and hence we have digital platforms. Interactivity is key... it’s not just about watching other people play, it’s also about the viewer being able to engage with it.
So the show is not limited to a certain school team in, say, the 15-18 age group... anyone in that age group can participate. I hope this show gets to viewers who like quizzing, and even to those who want to test their awareness and knowledge. The show runs round the year and everybody from the community is welcome to play. We have a system of ranking and one can see where one stands at any point in time.
We are living in counterfactual times. False narratives and twisted facts are everywhere, including in our own country. In such times, a factual culture and appreciation of the factual nature of things, of scepticism, of questioning things, knowing how to get to the root of things, of being able to establish facts and appreciate them, understand them and put them into context is very important. That was the guiding idea for Quizzer of the Year and thankfully I had terrific support from SonyLIV.
What are the salient features of Quizzer of the Year?
Being educative is, of course, one of the key reasons for the development of the show. We have tried to design the quiz in that way, with contextual information. It’s snappy, fun, and you can play it anytime. It’s not that demanding on time and it’s competitive because you get to see where you stand in relation to others. It’s a fun way of learning.
Apart from that, there is the exciting proposition of an all-India inter-school competition. The prize, which is very generous of SonyLIV, is a scholarship of Rs 1 crore. And even generally, there are daily, weekly and monthly prizes.
Has there been anything in the response to Quizzer of the Year, whether in terms of numbers or quality, that has taken you by surprise?
It has been doing very well. I have described the show as: ‘Get your daily dose of Vitamin Q.’ A quick fix, you know. Quizzer of the Year is about various things... it is topical, it’s about things people want to know about or should know about. It has a lot of variety.
We find some of our highest traffic at midnight because that is when people are perhaps more relaxed and have time at the end of the day. Apart from the fact that midnight opens up a new day of quizzing and hence new content. That’s peak time for us.
How do you get your daily dose of ‘Vitamin Q?’
From reading... and I would suggest that to everybody. From watching, listening, surfing and doing all of it intelligently. By its very definition, general knowledge stands for what is not part of your formal studies or formal specialisation. It’s everything else, and we all know how important multi-dimensional awareness is in today’s world. Not only experientially, but also to be able to survive, to compete, to know, to be informed, to be aware... those are important values.
Apart from what you have done and continue to be doing, what do you think needs to be done at the grassroots level to get the younger generation to take an active interest in quizzing and, more significantly, to understand the importance of factual culture?
I have spent a lifetime trying to do that. We have to interest people. We have done a bunch of general knowledge books which have been very successful and they are visually and thematically very differently arranged. They draw one’s attention to things that one probably walks past every day. Today, discovery learning is very important.
When one surfs the Internet, it’s most often non-discriminatory and one ends up discovering things that are eye-opening and mind-expanding. That is important. And if one gets some kind of validation or gratification out of it, then that is a good thing.
Is there anything that you came across today that has been eye-opening for you?
It happens to me all the time, on a daily basis. Like, if my team and I are researching something on the Ashes, then something new will invariably come up. It’s about the fun of finding out, but it’s also about sharing it with others. Like journalists finding out something and sharing it in the hope that it will engage people.
And yet, in college, you were not an avid quizzer yourself. What got you interested in it so much that it became a passion and your primary identity?
In college, I was certainly not part of the quizzing circuit. But in school, I would happily take part in classroom quizzes. I also did well in some of them, but my main interest was in theatre. By happenstance, I was emceeing something and someone saw it and asked me to introduce a show. Doordarshan was just opening up then and I was called for a pilot programme called Safecracker. I happily did it because it allowed me to get into television. One thing led to the other and all the opportunities I got had a ‘question mark’ attached to them, and so I thought that why not get good at this?
I had many years of making science films (documentaries) behind me. Rigour, research, precision and the veracity of fact-checking became important, apart from enticing people’s imagination and exciting them. So combining the art and science of content became key and started off my quizzing career.
Priyanka Roy
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