Schizophrenia

A review of the March 2011 monthly by Annie Sen Gupta

I came away from the SEQC March monthly conducted by Ajachi Chakrabarti with an overwhelming sense of having been treated to a barrage of obscurity. As a result, I was going to write a reasonably rude review about how the quiz was full of questions to which not only did we not know the answers, we didn't even know what the answers meant when they were revealed to us.

But before I got around to doing the review, I went over the Powerpoint file, preparing it for upload to the blog. As I was doing that, I was quite startled to find that the questions weren't as uninteresting as I had remembered them, nor the answers as obscure.

Going over the file more carefully, it struck me that the quiz was a Jekyll-and-Hyde formulation. The first half of the quiz was full of interesting and often new information about familiar things and people. There was only the odd question (Dinkytown!?) that broke this pattern.

The second half of the quiz, on the other hand, was completely different. My recollection of the quiz was evidently triggered by this part, which came afterwards and had shunted the memory of the first half from my brain.

The conclusion I have come to as a result of this review is that either our pal from BITS is severely schizophrenic, or he had someone else work on half the quiz for him. If it's the latter case, for the sake of the quizmaster in him, I hope he set the first half.