Thursday, February 25, 2010

Saraswat Quiz

Date: 28th February 2010
Time: Prelims - 9 am, Finals 5.30 pm
QM: Harshvardhan Bhatkuly
Part of: Saraswat Food & Cultural Festival
Flavour: General & Saraswat trivia
Venue: BPS Club, Margao
Participation: Open to students of Std. VIII & IX from the Saraswat community

7 comments:

Somnath said...

Quiz could be on a caste but why participation is also caste-based?

Rajiv D'Silva said...

@Somnath,
That's a question only the organisers can answer, I'm afraid. Why don't you attend the quiz and heckle them a bit ;-)?

Somnath said...

I think I'll be barred from entry as I am neither in VIII/IX std nor a Saraswat!
I do not have anything against the organizers as such but promoting these events on blogs like "SEQC" is something I did'nt liked.
I wonder, very soon we will have Hindu Quiz and catholic Quiz, too?

Anniesen said...

I'm inclined to agree with Somnath. People can be discriminatory if they like, but SEQC is one of the most open forums there is, and I don't personally like the idea of an event which discriminates on participation based on an illegal and abhorrent system being featured here.

Rajiv D'Silva said...

Somnath & Annie,
While I agree with both of you in principle, as a blog dedicated to quizzing in Goa, our job is merely to inform people about quizzes happening in Goa, and we neither endorse nor are responsible for the content or participation criteria the organizers decide to adopt. After all, from the quizzing point of view, the Saraswat quiz is no more or less discriminatory than a quiz that only allows students or corporates or some such.

Groucho said...

Rajiv, participation in this quiz was caste-based. Discrimination in terms of categories like age, student status, and even corporate/organisational status is fine. Despite Venita's reservations, we could even have women-only quizzes. And KQA does family quizzes and suchlike. All these I find acceptable. But having caste, religion, race, ethnicity, etc, as criteria for participation does not appeal to me.
Maybe we should evolve a policy that we will not announce quizzes based on aspects like this? Apart from this one quiz, I find no other quiz that we have announced or featured has anything about it that makes me uncomfortable the way this one does. So it will end up being a rarely-applied rule.

Rajiv D'Silva said...

Agreed, Gadgil. I'm as staunchly anti-casteist as you, but our mandate is report on ALL quizzes happening in Goa regardless of whether we personally approve of the content/participants/organizers or not. Once we begin to say that we will not report certain quizzes I think we are beginning to enter some shaky territory. We are a quiz club and we cannot take a political line on these things. We will obviously never organize such an event, we are here merely reporting that this event is being held. Any objections are best taken up with the organizers.