KQA Open Quiz
April ’15 Prelims
(with Answers)
FORECASTING COUCH
AJAY, KESHAV AND SRS

The rules
! Every fifth question is starred
! Sudden death if there’s still a tie after that
! Thirty questions altogether

Q1. Three culinary puns from these
murals on a Vasudev Adiga wall

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A1. Setting questions from where I
stopped for a snack is … but anyway
! The Good, The Bad and the Idly
! James Bonda
! Arre Oh Sambhar

Q2.
! The person in the picture began his theatre
career in 1984, directing Tom Topor’s
courtroom drama Nuts. In 1991, his
production of Gurcharan Das’ Larins
Sahib was the first Indian play to be staged
at the Edinburgh Festival. In 1996, he
Indianised and adapted Herb
Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport, calling it I’m
Not Bajirao which became an instant
success. Since 2002, he has been writing his
own plays as well.
! He is the present custodian of a well-known
campaign started by his father and
sometimes refreshed as frequently as six
times a week
! Who? Full name required.

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A2.
! Rahul Da Cunha, of Da Cunha Communications who runs the Amul
Girl campaigns

Q3.
! In 2012, The Onion named this personage its ‘Sexiest Man Alive’
! “He has that rare ability to somehow be completely adorable and
completely macho at the same time,” Onion Style and
Entertainment editor Marissa Blake-Zweibel said. “And that’s the
quality that makes him the sort of man women want, and men want
to be. He’s a real hunk with real intensity who also knows how to cut
loose and let his hair down.”
! In a turn of events that even The Onion’s editors would not have
imagined, Chinese newspaper People’s Daily Online took to this
piece of news with utmost glee, even devoting a 55 page full colour
spread to this person.
! Who?

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A3.
! Kim Jong Un

Q4.
! Courtesy The Hindu, Chennai edition
! The Freedom brand of products was launched by a wing of the Tamil Nadu
government in 2014. There are two outlets – one in Saidapet and another one in
Egmore. The Saidapet outlet stocks bakery items such as samosas, puffs and buns
whereas the Egmore one stocks organic vegetables
! Price and location are the main reasons why the Freedom Bazaar is a hit.
! “I shop for items worth at least Rs. 50 every day before leaving home and I get quite
a lot. They are reasonably priced and of fairly good quality,” says V. Senthil, a lawyer
at the Saidapet Court.
! If the Saidapet outlet's proximity to the court works to its advantage, the one at
Egmore benefits from the presence of many residential colonies.
! “We have many buyers from MMDA Towers and CMDA blocks for the organically
grown tomatoes, lady's finger and greens. If the supply of vegetables is regular, we
can draw many more customers. Requests have also come for the leather shoes,”
says a staff at the Egmore outlet.
! Question is, who runs the Freedom Bazaar outlets?

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A4.
! Tamil Nadu prisons

Q5. **
! ‘The Noonday Demon’ is a book by Andrew Solomon. The book was
honored in 2001 with the National Book Award for Nonfiction and
the Lambda Literary Award for autobiography or memoir. In 2002 it
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
! The book borrows its title from the Bible (91:6) – “the destruction that
wasteth at noonday”
! Joyce Carol Oates, writing in the NY Times remarked on the
appropriateness of the title - “Though one might wince at the
theological metaphor, with its suggestion of demonic possession -- a
primitive stage in our comprehension [..] of illness we like to believe
we've advanced beyond -- still the poetic figure of speech is a
powerful one”
! What is ‘The Noonday Demon’ all about?

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A5.**
! Depression

Q6.
! Over 3000 people congregated at the SCG to watch Phil Hughes’
funeral on the giant screen. Amongst the many tributes paid that
day, there was a really unique one from SCG curator Tom Parker.
What announcement did he make?

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A6.
! Announced the ‘retirement’ of pitch number 7.

Q7. Natpurwa, near Hardoi in UP
! Natpurwa is a village of Nats - a caste of traditional street acrobats.
! The acrobatic skills and nomadic lifestyle of the Nats made them
“the usual suspects” whenever a “cat burglar” theft was committed
in an area near where they happened to be. This led the British to list
their community under the Criminal Tribes Act, which was used to
suppress, among others, the Thugs.
! The restrictions placed on the Nats of Natpurwa by this Act were so
severe that they gave up street acrobatics, and took up another
traditional profession in which acrobatics is also a prized skill.
! Even today, every man and woman of Natpurwa is involved in this
new profession in one way or the other. The availability of education
is gradually changing this situation, but this still by and large the case.
! What profession did they adopt?

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A7. Prostitution

Q8.
! This band’s maiden performance was during the inaugural
ceremony of the National Games of India 2015.
! The performance was reported as being underwhelming (lip syncing
to a recorded tape and so on). The band drew a lot of flak for
charging a performance fee of Rs. 1.60 crores.
! Irate fans have since taken to the internet, using all possible fora to
voice their disappointment. For instance, Urban Dictionary now has
the name of the band listed as ‘The act of courting unwanted
controversy by doing something that you are not an expert at,
especially singing’
! Name of the band/lead singer

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A8.

Q9.
! Identify the poet.
I am a man of action
Even when I write,
I draw a circle of words
And then I make the circle a square.
In that circle which is now a square
I place words, colorful, smooth as marbles
These words of glass
Are words of truth—like tears
They form a period at the end of a
sentence.
Near lie the adjectives, within the
confines of a
Lakshman Rekha
They keep the piety of Ram
Adjacent to them the nouns keep playing
A game of tic-tac-toe.
I keep the verb in the center,
And then I draw one endless circle,
resolute.

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A9.
! Modi

Q10. Identify the speaker **
and the artist / song
! “When I was living then separated from Armand, I went
and was very much interested in the waterfront. The St.
Lawrence River held a particular poetry and beauty to
me and (I) decided to live there with our daughter, Julie.
<Artist> heard about this place I was living, with crooked
floors and a poetic view of the river, and he came to visit
me many times. We had tea together many times and
mandarin oranges.”
! <Artist> wrote <a song> about this platonic relationship.
He later compared the song to a 1982 Chateau Latour.

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A10.
! Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Verdal

Q11.
! This tea blend was created for the December 2014 edition of an
annual party.
! “The blend is based on a Chinese Keemun tea produced in Qimen
country situated in Anhui Province. Blended together with an Indian
Assam tea, this tea attains a gorgeous color and lovely scent. "The
tea is flavored with the finest bergamot from Italy, complemented
with the sweetness of Swedish raspberries and the fresh taste of
orange. A true cosmopolitan blend, it was created in collaboration
with tea specialist Vernon Mauris.”
! What was the occasion for which this blend was prepared?

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A11.
! Nobel Banquet 2014. The blend is called The Nobel Museum blend

Q12.
! Chinese shoppers in Ginza, Japan buy what mainlanders pejoratively
call the ‘four treasures’ – brand name rice cookers, vacuum flasks,
ceramic knives and __________?

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A12.
! Japanese high-tech toilet seats

Q13.
! X is an upcoming Hollywood film about the relationship between two
brothers, one a violinist and the other a gangster. It has the gang
wars in the US-Mexico border as its backdrop. Wikipedia also adds
that it also talks about how wrong choices can destroy lives and
everything that one loves.
! A Hindi version of X has not been planned yet.
! X? Who is the director?

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A13.
! Broken Horses, directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Q14.
! In 2014, Google acquired a company that has developed a
multipurpose utensil (fork, spoon, keychain ..) that can reduce the
impact of neuromuscular tremor, using hundreds of algorithms, sense
the level of hand tremors and subsequently make adjustments to
stay steady. According to trials, this device is capable of reducing up
to 76% of the impact of tremors, enabling sufferers from
neuromuscular disorders such as Parkinson’s to regain their capacity
to actually use these implements.
! What is the name given to this device?

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A14.
! Liftware

** Q15. Two scoops, both on a June 8
The first scoop? The Photographer?
! June 8, 1972 - ?
! June 8, 2007 - this shot of Paris
Hilton sobbing in the back of a
LA police car after having been
ordered back to jail

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A15. Nick Ut (with the napalm girl Kim Phuc)

Q16.
! Still from an in-the-making Bengali film. Who are Parambrata and
Konkona portraying? First names are sufficient

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A16
! Rabindranath Tagore and Kadambari Devi

Q17.
! Whose epitaph? 2014 demise.
‘Here lies one who spared neither man nor God;
Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod;
Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun;
Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.”

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A17.
! Khushwant Singh

Q18. In 1962, she chucked it into her
attic - only to dig it out in 2001
! It - an iconic it - sold at Christie’s for £35,000
! Not bad for a simple creation in white ivory cotton that was whipped
up in a hurry by designer Tessa Prendergast, in consultation with
Terence Young, so that she could have a little something available
to wear when she turned up on the beach at Oracabessa.
! Who sold ‘it’? What was ‘it’?

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A18. Ursula Andress
The white bikini

Q19. Wikipedia, on 13/2/2015,
banned a longtime admin ‘Wifione’
! The accusation was that Wifione was a fake identity (sockpuppet)
and was further operating several other such sockpuppet accounts
as part of a paid publicity effort.
! Whose wikipedia page was Wifione primarily focused on?

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A19. IIPM

** Q20. In the Anglican church, this
was a minor civilian functionary
! He was responsible for various minor administrative tasks
! Maintaining order in the church
! Supervising its properties, employees and dependants
! Even today, in some old church run colleges such as the King’s
school at Canterbury, he is responsible for maintaining discipline
among the students - essentially the equivalent of the “PT meshtru” in
our schools.
! The most famous fictional example of such an official is widely known
for his rude refusal of a polite request.
! What is such an official called? Who made the polite request?

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A20. Beadle. Oliver Twist.

Q21. The Swedish National Encyclopaedia, in
2013, officially adopted a new word - “Hen” -
into the Swedish language.
! This word, a compromise between the Swedish words “Han” and
“Hon”, has been in informal use from at least the mid 1960s, but only
became a formal part of the Swedish language upon being added
to the encyclopaedia.
! Why, if not because of a sudden desire to acknowledge the not so
vital part that poultry plays in Swedish cuisine, was “Hen” adopted as
a Swedish word? Or in other words, what does “Hen” mean?

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A21. A gender neutral personal pronoun

Q22. Two Ben and Jerry nocturnally themed
flavours that are both in honor of [X]
! “Late Night Snack” - Vanilla Bean base with Salty Caramel swirls and
Fudge covered Potato Chip (!!!) clusters.
! “The [removed] Dough” - Caramel & Chocolate Ice Creams with
Chocolate Cookie Swirls & Gobs of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough &
Peanut Butter Cookie Dough
! I guess if you are awake long enough, you’ll eat anything. But
anyway, who and what are these two flavours in honour of?

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A22. The Tonight Show
with Jimmy Fallon

Q23.
What comes from the Latin phrase
“A weight of One Pound”?

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A23. “lb” for Pound - Libra Pondo

Q24. Members of which royal family? The most famous
one is located on the left. What is special about the
names given to members of this royal family?

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A24.
Travancore royal family
Named for their birth star + “Auspicious
Day” - for example, Swathi Thirunal

** Q25. Who about whom?
! “I saw her for the first time in a full page photograph in an American
magazine: a powerful panther playing the mischievous young girl,
astride the bannister of a stairway. “My God!” I thought, “don’t ever
let me meet her”.
! Several years later, he met her in the garden of the Hotel de la Ville ..
[…], the while drinking one of those cocktails full of colors, flags and
little fish from an enormous glass and speaking in a husky, childlike
voice that made her even more overwhelming.[…]
! And in a total stupor, I murmured to myself, “Ah, these are earlobes,
these are gums, this is human skin”.
! And here is how he sketched her. [next slide]

Sketch

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A25. Federico Fellini, about casting
Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita

Q26.
! The Büyük Menderes river
runs through Turkey and into
the Aegean sea. This river is
heavily laden with silt, so
that irregular deposits of silt
form on one bank, while the
bank on the other side
erodes, diverting the river’s
course out of line. This
pattern repeats itself over
hundreds of kilometers.
! What Geographical term
describing such an erosion
pattern comes from an
alternate name for this river?

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A26. Meander

Q27. An innovative way to handle
iodine deficiency in women
! Neelvasant Medical Foundation and Research Centre in Nashik has
come up with a innovative way to ensure that women in rural
Maharashtra do not suffer from iodine deficiency.
! This is accomplished without them having to buy iodized instead of
plain salt, and is solely based on a daily personal habit that several
indian women practice. What mechanism to deliver a woman’s
daily quota of Iodine have they come up with?

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A27. Iodine infused Bindis

Q28. The Urdu name for a certain
substance is “Jarman”
! This is probably due to its Teutonic origins, being first isolated in 1827
by German chemist Friedrich Wohler.
! Its exceeding rarity at the time before it came to be mass produced
in the 1880s meant that products made from it were prized family
possessions, and generally imported from Germany, giving it the
name “German”.
! What is this material?

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A28. Aluminium

Q29. Who is the creator of this board game?

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A29. Ankit F(r)a(u)dia

** Q30. When naming this character
! The creator wanted something ominous, suggesting destruction and
domination.
! He got himself a thesaurus and played around with several words
that were related to this concept, such as dark, death, invader etc
before coming up with ____________

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A30. Darth Vader