The Purple Cow

For three months every year through high school, all I would think about was the Columban Open Quiz. It would invariably dawn on me while I baked in the long trip back home in the school bus and an urgent tiny knot would form deep inside. I was always dreadfully early, of course. It would be another few weeks of fretting before the official invitation would arrive- a bland little letter addressed to the principal of my school asking for participants for the annual St. Columba’s quiz competition. And could she please put up the enclosed poster on the school notice board?

After being tossed around on random desks for another week, the letter would eventually find its way to me and that knot would become a little tighter. The Columban Open was, after all, the biggest event of that incestuous circle that made up Delhi school quizzing. It wasn’t the prize money; in fact, there wasn’t even a trophy – just an outsized cardboard cheque for a few thousand rupees. And besides, there were other flashier quizzes around, throwing around pots of gold with Derek O’Brien bounding around the stage. It wasn’t particularly the quality of questions either, though the Columban was never terrible. Almost any St. Stephens 2nd year student worth his Fabindia kurta could put together a better quiz – with the obligatory generous sprinkling of Douglas Adams, Asterix and Quentin Tarantino, guaranteed to warm the hearts of a bunch of too-cool-by-half high school teenagers.

What the Columban had, however, was that rare, fuzzy warmth which I can only best describe as a sense of institution. It was the kind that seeped into all the little things that stayed behind long after the quiz was done and dusted. It turned up in the prayer before the written qualifiers, led by Brother Coelho in that irritating over-kind manner peculiar to Brothers. Or the ritual disqualification of teams with vaguely blasphemous team names, there were always some ‘Few Ultimately Cool Kids’. We took it all in as wide-eyed amateurs the first time (1998, was there really such a year?) – the casual meetings between old friends and deadly enemies in the lawns outside, each silently revising the Ultimate Trivia handbook. In later years we would be appropriately blasé, tie undone, jaunty hands in jaunty pockets, quietly condescending towards the newbies – as cool as bunch of people who had mugged up the capital of Sierra Leone could possibly be. All this of course, till we trooped into that enormous hall, found our chairs with the prelim sheets lying face down and started behaving like petulant 5-year olds again.

Teams that qualified into the finals came back on Saturday evening, parents in tow. It was a long lazy affair, like a test match at Lord’s – 25 rounds, something like 200 questions, with a samosa and sandwiches break in between. The mood was set by the quizmaster, Francis Groser, a wrinkled Anglo-Indian-from-Calcutta uncle who I now think looked a lot like the Dalai Lama. He would grin constantly, even when we acted obnoxious and would invariably break into a small jig when playing one of his old favorites in the audio round. (I refer to, of course, the slight hip twist with one leg off the ground which all wrinkled Anglo-Indian-from-Calcutta uncles come pre-packaged with.) By the time we turned up for the last of my Columbans in 2001, we had all come to know old Groser rather well. The previous night, we would have read up on Norse myth because Groser was known to ask at least one question on Asgard or the Valkyries or some such. He, in turn, would introduce us to the audience as one of the old-timers. We would beam away to no one in particular.

I won the Columban only once, as a fifteen year old. I cried silently, slightly embarrassed at myself, as the last question passed around while my older, wiser team-mates exchanged handshakes. I remember it distinctly, as if it happened yesterday while my other more grown-up half was busy doing banker stuff. It’s a point of reference really, a moment I hold against all others as a challenge to move me to tears of joy once again. Of course, as I now realize, it was never the moment that did it – it was the fifteen-year old me. And I’ve grown inexorably older…