Pop culture to history, open quiz session at Dalhousie Institute covers much more
Telegraph | 29 November 2025
Q: The notorious “thugs” of the Thuggee cult used to strangle and rob travellers on the roads of Hindustan. Why would they strangle their victims and not kill them by other means?
A: Spilling blood was punishable by death, while strangling was punishable by a lesser sentence.
A marquee event in the Calcutta quizzing circuit traversed pop culture, history, cinema, literature and more.
The 43rd edition of the Patton RM Sen Argus Open Quiz, in association with The Telegraph and supported by Carring Minds International, was held at Dalhousie Institute on Sunday.
Presented by the Bengal Quiz Foundation (BQF), the quiz was for teams of four. As many as 35 teams registered for the event.
There was a preliminary round of 24 written questions. The top eight teams then went on to the final, which was a live round of 48 questions. The quizmasters this year were Rajeev Bhattacharjee and Shayak Chakraborty.
The team that won call themselves Sarbamangala Sporting Club, named after a football team in the 1971 film Dhanni Meye starring Uttam Kumar and Jaya Bhaduri.
Sourasish Bose, Aakash Roy, Sarbajit Mitra and Bhaskar Datta were the members of the winning team.
As the quiz went down to the wire, the questions tested even the quiz veterans.
Some of the questions and their answers;
Q: If I were to accuse you of having griffonage, what would I be accusing you of having?
A: Bad or illegible handwriting
Q: What eight-lettered word was coined by US magazine Seventeen in 1944? Hint: Today, it is a huge global market.
A: Teenager
Team Hammer and Tongs finished second, and Shaukeens came third.
“This annual event was run for its first 36 years by the one-man army of the Late R.M. Sen, who passed away in 2020. The Bengal Quiz Foundation now runs it. The event, with beginnings in 1979, has, with a handful of other such quizzes, been tagged a Legacy Quiz of India,” said BQF trustee Abhijit Banerjee.