Derek masters 'em all

"WHICH IS the largest bird in Australia? What's a jaberon? Which is the crab which appears to be religious? What's the Chilkha lake famous for?" If these are awesome questions, try this one: "If a vet is the doctor who takes care of the dog who is the one who attends to a horse?"

With such an eclectic mix of questions, the quizmaster, Derek O' Brien, held scores of schoolchildren, their teachers and the competing teams enthralled at the jampacked Ravindra Bharathi on Monday for the annual `Discovery Channel Quiz 2000' contest.

This popular quiz being held for the fourth consecutive year has become a big hit with the schools throughout the country. Sponsored by Britannia and Hero Cycles, it is being conducted in 18 cities (from the earlier 14) and over 900 schools are expected to participate.

What adds fizz to the quiz is quite obviously the bespectacled Derek. One has to see the amazing following he has among the youth to be believed. He was there on the stage right from the word go -- reading out the rules, posing queries to the contesting teams and shouting hoarse in sync with the shrieking children.

For a good two hours and more, he was hyper. "You may shout, clap, make noise but don't shout the answers," was his repartee. His asides and T-throwing tactics were a great hit with the gathering.

Back to the quiz, there were separate contests for the seniors (from classes eight to 10) and juniors (classes five to seven) with children from 43 schools trooping into the hall. Initially, a written test was conducted among teams of twos for selecting the top six for the final rounds to be conducted by the quizmaster.

Eye-witness round had a video song clip and teams were asked to recall scenes from it; `Think better', `A plus round', `Showcase', `KQ round', etc were the other rounds. And, what's this `KQ'? It means simply - Knowledge Quotient, a bank of over one lakh questions on diverse subjects prepared by Derek's research team.

Participants were asked to choose an alphabet and questions were asked on the subject which starts with that letter - cricket, music, space and so on. Interestingly, during quizzing, one of the teams could not recognise Jyoti Basu while another surprise, surprise, couldn't get the voice of Urmila Matondkar right.

The quizmaster was at his smart best once. Showing a picture, he said: "Give me a two-word answer". Said the boy: "A bald eagle". "I wanted a two-word answer". "Ok. Bald eagle". "Correct!"

The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan School's team of Shalini and Ram Anand (juniors) and the Hyderabad Public School's team of Aditya Krishnan and Abhishek Krishna (seniors) bagged the first prize of Rs. 5,000, a silver plaque and Hero cycles. While the team of Jayashree and Kritika of Chinmaya Vidyalaya (juniors) and Tejasri Puthriya and Aditya Ghosh of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (seniors) bagged the second prizes of Rs. 3,000 (per team).

Oh! The answers for the questions in the beginning are: Emu, rednecked stork, Hermit club and prawns! While the doctor treating horses is also a vet! "Even if you don't win anything you will at least learn something," was Derek's remark. Can't disagree with that.

By V. Geetanath

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