Being a woman quizmaster

7 years ago, I put together a quizzing event on my favourite topic: Italy. It was a runaway success, and it spurred my business partner Nina and me to up the ante and make it huger – which we did over the next two years, covering more than 30 quizzes in all on Italy. I helped make content, put together a delicious little puzzle book, marched about the live shows strewing audience prizes and eventually the chapter quietly closed.

Then, in 2012, two of the quartet that had founded a quizzing company together proposed a family quiz on Harry Potter. The prizes and media coverage were Outstanding, participation got an Exceeded Expectations, but they made the most God-awful Wikipedia content, worthy of no better than a T for Troll. After some most enjoyable red-penning of the content, I also experienced the joy of conducting the Prelims.

I felt for content. I revelled on stage. I knew the back-stories behind answers. I loved the applause. I even liked giving away prizes. By now, quizzing had gotten sneakily under my skin, though I didn’t as yet know that. I derided – and continue to get irked by – quizzers for their unbearable know-it-all attitude, the all-pervasive locker-room attitude that they exude and the quizzing “fundas” they tend to spout, which are mostly poppycock, even if sometimes entertaining.

Now, a couple of TV shows under my belt, a dozen quiz-and-knowledge books with my name and my lipsticked face printed on the cover, quiz-mastering glass ceilings lying in shards beneath my five-inch heels, I am still a QM viewed with scepticism. I clearly don’t fit the image. As a woman quizmaster, I should ideally be shapeless, sexless and awkward, like a lesbian who is struggling to come out or a twenty-year old girl who needs strip herself of her blossoming youth to be taken seriously.

But the content creation process – the astonishing things one learns, as lyrical as they are quiz-worthy trivia, the perennial journey of discovery that leaves the researcher (at least, me) open-mouthed in wonder, the joyous unravelling of mysteries, the piecing together of the final jigsaw – has me firmly in its grip. And the stage! Notwithstanding the dull, pompous, self-important lassitude with which most Quizmasters conduct their business on stage, laugh at their own jokes, show off their knowledge and sneer at wrong answers, conducting a quiz can be a wonderful piece of showbiz.

REFERENCES:

1.     Mrs. Vasanthi Gupta, Director, Alliance Française de Delhi (Gurgaon)

2.    Dr. Tanya Roy, Associate Professor of Italian, Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi

3.    Prof. Giannina Perrucchini, Former Reader appointed by the Italian Ministry of External Affairs, Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, Former Professor of Italian, Venice