1. Between 1945 and 1974, the Japanese government sent former military officers on missions to isolated islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to convince Japanese soldiers still there that World War 2 was over and they should surrender. 2. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the US Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature promoted by Wilhelm Reich, believing they were fraudulent. They then symbolically burnt over 6 tons of his publications to express disdain for his ideas. 3. Several countries have voluntarily or involuntarily switched from driving on the right side of the road to the left, or vice versa, including Western Samoa, Rwanda, Bur

1. The Quizmasters Couldn’t
Agree On a Name

2. 1
• Starting August 1945, several senior Japanese military officers and
members of the Imperial family were sent on missions, all with the
same purpose, to islands on the Pacific and Indian Oceans. These
missions carried on sporadically with men who had been military
officers on through the late 1940s right up to March 1974, when the
Japanese government sent bookseller and former Japanese Army
Major Yoshimi Taniguchi to the island of Lubang in Phillipines, where
he successfully completed the last of these missions.
• What was the aim of these missions?

3. Got it?

4. Convincing isolated Japanese troops that the
War was over and they should surrender.

5. 2
• Carmen, Georges Bizet
• Swan Lake, Pyotr Tchaikovsky
• Romeo and Juliet, Pyotr Tchaikovsky
• Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven
• Scheherezade, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
• The Phantom of the Opera, Andrew Lloyd Weber
• Tosca, Giaccomo Puccini
>The aforementioned pieces are a list of the most popular ones used in a particular
context. What context?
>This list will change extensively courtesy certain modifications made in 2018.
What has been modified?

6. Easy there…

7. • These are the songs used in figure skating
in the Olympics
• The list will change because since 2018 lyrical music will be allowed.

8. 3
• Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst who
became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.
After graduating in medicine, he worked at Freud’s outpatient clinic, the Vienna
Ambulatorium, where he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing
that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socioeconomic conditions. Wanting to
“attack neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment”, he visited patients in
their homes to see how they lived in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent
sexuality and availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative
message in Catholic Austria.
• He massaged disrobed patients to dissolve their “muscular armour”, and after
moving to New York to escape the Nazis, coined the term ‘orgone’ – from orgasm
and organism, for a biological energy he said he discovered which others called
God. He started writing extensively about it in books and periodicals, and in 1940,
started building orgone accumulators, devices his patients sat inside to harness
the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that
cure cancer.

9. • Following two critical articles about him in the New Republic and
Harper’s in 1947, the US FDA obtained an injunction against interstate
shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing
they were dealing with a “fraud of first magnitude”.
• He was charged with contempt in 1956 for violating the injunction
and submitted to 2 years imprisonment. But more importantly, the
FDA did something which had the dual purpose of both preventing
the spread of his ideas as well as being symbolic – expressing disdain
and contempt for these ideas.
• What did the FDA do?

10. Safety first.

11. They burnt his books.
• Over 6 tons of his publications were burned by order of the court,
outside the FDA headquarters.

12. 4
• (Western) Samoa in 2009 became the only country to do this
voluntarily. Rwanda and Burundi have been considering doing this,
but have not been able to decide on the issue.
• East Timor (1975), Southwest Africa (1918) and Korea (1910) did this
at the behest of occupying/colonising countries. Okinawa did this in
1978 after military occupation ceased.
• Several countries have done something similar, but exactly opposite.
• What?

13. Hold that thought.

14. Switch from driving on the right hand side of
the road to the left hand side of the road

15. 5. MUSIC! Video 1

16. MUSIC! Video 2.

17. Got it?

18. 3 generations of the same family perform in
the same song.

19. 6
• Leland Stanford was a 19th century railroad tycoon, Governor of
California and the cofounder (along with his wife) of Stanford
University.
• One of his claims to fame was an experiment he commissioned,
conducted by photographer Eadweard Muybridge at a farm he owned
in Palo Alto on 1878, which accidentally created one of the first
motion pictures.
• What was the purpose of the experiment on which Stanford was
alleged to have bet a large amount?

20. Go for it, really easy.

21. To prove that all four of a horse’s hooves
leave the ground when galloping

22. 7
• Although this word is likely of Indian origin, and is still used in India
today (albeit in a specific contect0, it was widely used to describe
Chinese immigrants who helped build, among other things, the
Transcontinental Railroad in the USA. Due to racist attitudes towards
Chinese and other Asians, such immigrants were banned in the USA
and Canada, and had to return to China in most cases. Even after the
practice of hiring Chinese to perform menial labour overseas died out,
the word survived, and one of FDR’s Fireside Chats contains a story of
“Two Chinese ________”.
• What is the word?

23. Chill…

24. Coolie.

25. 7
• Najre Hasan, who was trying to leave the city was arrested for this
crime. During interrogation, he confessed that he had stolen them to
repay the money borrowed from some people. He sold them to
jewellers Shankarlal Seth and Sujit Seth of Piyari locality. Later the
jewellers were arrested and the melted silver was recovered from
them.
• Three of them were recovered and were gifted to its original owner
by former PM PV Narasimha Rao, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Kapil Sibal.
• What was thus recovered from the jeweller?

26. Think about today!

27. • Ustad Bismillah Khan’s Shehnais

28. 8
• During examination time, anxious parents and students have flooded
Chemmoth Sree Subramaniya Swami temple in Alleppey, Kerala with
chocolates to propitiate the deity. The chocolate of a particular brand
is the reigning offering, and hence the deity is affectionately known as
______ _________.
• FITB with an alliterative nickname.

30. Safety first.

31. Munch Murugan

32. 9
• When Coca-Cola discovered that part of its classic logo looks like the
flag of the country in questions, the brand decided to make an
interactive airport ad that dispenses flags.
• Apparently it’s the country’s tradition to greet travellers by waving
flags, and Coke wanted to help make a bigger show of the fact that
passengers were arriving in the country, ranked as the ‘happiest
country in the world’.
• It is illegal to burn foreign flags, but not illegal to burn the flag of this
country.

33. Denmark.

34. 10
• Three manuscript versions were produced, handpainted in
watercolour in the Japanese characters of katakana and hiragana and
a third version in Arabic numerals. This third version developed into
the International edition, first published in 1917 by the Kanahara
Trading Company.
• Who hand-painted them/what are we talking about?

35. Safety first.

36. Isihara charts for colour blindness.

37. 11. Complete the series

41. Safety first.

42. Anything by Leonardo da Vinci.

43. Tamatoa is a giant, villainous coconut crab from Disney’s Moana. A
“beady eyed bottom feeder”, he covers his shell in gold, rare artefacts
and other treasures in a grotesque attempt at overcompensation. He
eventually develops a crazed love for all things shiny, and is driven into
madness by this quest.
The question is simple. Who voiced the character Tamatoa in the Hindi
version of Moana? Unsurprisingly, the voice actor said that the
character and especially the song “Shiny” spoke to something within
him.
12

44. Safety first.

45. Bappi Lahiri.

46. Arthur Phillip, the first leader of the colonisation of Australia, originally
named Sydney Cove “New Albion”, but the colony later acquired the
name Sydney.
This comes from the fact that Albion is the oldest known name for the
island of Great Britain, still used poetically today.
It was named Albion after a specific geographical feature visible from
mainland Europe on a clear day.
What is this feature, which coincidentally has nothing to do with the
modern day country of Albania?
13

47. Safety first.

48. The White Cliffs of Dover

49. The Bechdel Test, named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel
asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to
each other about something other than a man. This test is used as an
indicator for the active presence of women in films and other fiction,
and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
Movie critic Sahil Rizwan parodied it by creating the X test, saying “Even
in scenes where Y isn’t on screen, other characters are basically just
discussing Y’s characters.
ID X and Y.
14

50. Safety first.

51. The Bhaichdel Test, Salman Khan.

52. X
Y
15. FitB

53. Safety first.

55. Located in Paris, this monument of sorts to X, an author, took sculptor
Jacob Epstein 9 months to complete. Curiously, it was commissioned in
in 1908, a full 8 years after X had cause to use it.
Admirers of X from all over the globe visit this site even today, and as a
mark of appreciation, apply lipstick before kissing the monument.
Despite this practice being banned by authorities, it continues, forcing
the erection of a glass barrier to protect the monument.
Ironically, a lipstick mark, a signature of female appreciation, would
have not appealed in the slightest to X.
ID X and the monument we are speaking of.
16

56. Safety first.

57. The Tomb of Oscar Wilde

58. A relatively unusual method of narrowing down a timeline has been
used by researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Using this method, they arrived at a window of time from 80,000 years
ago to 170,000 years ago, which is when humanity started
experimenting with clothing while still in Africa.
What is this method, that uses surprisingly not fossil remains,
paintings, or gravesite artefacts, but instead uses genotype analysis?
17

59. Safety first.

60. Divergence of head lice and pubic lice DNA.

61. “The game you know as _______,” he said, and his voice still seemed to be
wandering, lost in subterranean passages, “is just one of those curious freaks
of racial memory that can keep images alive in the mind eons after their true
significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races in the Galaxy,
only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars
ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I’m afraid is generally
regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.”
The above is an extract from a work of fiction. The wars mentioned became
the basis of a Doctor Who novel written by the same author, although the
original work has nothing to do with the show.
What is the game being referred to here? Bonus points for identifying the
speaker.
18

62. Safety first.

63. Cricket.

64. You know that face. The clever, asymmetrical smirk. The
similarly crooked eyebrows. The intense stare-down that comes at you
from the promo posters. It's the expression that tells you the hero is
going to be up to no good, and is much cooler than any of those classic,
mainstream, conformist wimps those other studios produce... except
the character him- or -herself never, or rarely, makes that face to begin
with in the show! It's the facial expression form of hip, sassy and snarky
dialogue.
Named after the studio who overuses this to death. What is being
talked about here, a staple of almost all posters this studio releases?
19

65. Safety first.

66. The Dreamworks Face/ Dreamworks eyebrow

67. This specific designing tactic used by manufacturers of products
marketed to children might seem like a no brainer once you catch on to
it, but is a good example of how the subtlest things might boost sales,
provided you think of it.
This tactic is almost universally used by manufacturers of children’s
cereal.
Ironically, the reason it appeals to a child is exactly why it would fail to
have the same effect on an adult.
What are we talking about here?
20

68. Safety first.

69. Eyes of the mascots pointing downwards.

70. Fin.