Blue leopards roaring (the pub quiz chronicles contd)

At risk of turning this space into a monthly “quiz report”... at the Depot48 pub quiz last Sunday, our team (rechristened “Neela Tendua” in a moment of inspiration by young Eshan Sharma) improbably finished second. (The other team members here: Anant Raina, Suman Parmar and Akila Jayaraman. Along with QM Adittya Nath Mubayi.) I say “improbably” because we had made hardly any progress after the first round, and at that stage we were mainly aiming to finish the quiz with no minus points.

My long-time friend and one-time team member Trisha Gupta was a guest quizmaster for this edition, and my moment of glory occurred with the first question she asked (no it wasn’t rigged, but who will believe that now). It involved identifying Dadasaheb Phalke’s daughter Mandakini, who had played baby Krishna in his film Kaliya Mardan (which I have shown in film-history classes).
 
I was also the only person in the room to get the answer to one of the last questions, about an actress named after a wine, and her famous grandfather. (See pic here.) It was most gratifying to see the wild guesses made by other teams, who seemed to have thought the grandfather was named after a wine too, and came up with suggestions like "Dom Perignon". (And even better, as Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi reminded me on Instagram a while back, "Mel Blanc and Chenin Blanc".)

Very satisfying, all told - despite our underwhelming start to the quiz.

P.S. I am probably sounding like a quizzing nerd now - so just to clarify that I have at no earlier point in my life done these things, and these pub quizzes of the past 2-3 years have mainly been informal, fun gatherings with friends + snacks + cocktails. The one time I took a quiz really seriously, it was a film-themed one which we topped (a post about that here).