Quizmaster’s Choice | History & Politics Quiz

Sparsh Agarwal & Zainab Firdausi, Class of 2019.

This is a weekly column summarizing the 5 best questions from the quiz held by the Quizzing Society of Ashoka University on 3rd of October.

Q 1. In 1973, a 22-year-old featured in a DCM Towels campaign. The tag line said, “Towels so good you want to wear them”.

The ads were hurriedly withdrawn. Who was the model, and subsequent Member of Parliament?

Q 2. The Jharkhand Vidhan Sabha has a peculiar problem. This problem was exacerbated in the year 2004 when Madhu Koda (an independent candidate) became Chief Minister indirectly taking advantage of this problem.

What could this problem be?

Q 3. In 1960, when X came to NYC for the UNGA, tensions were riding high. X had originally checked into the famous Shelbourne Hotel. However, he was asked to leave because of X’s “uncouth primitives” who had supposedly “killed, plucked, and cooked chickens in their rooms at the Shelburne and extinguished cigars on expensive carpets”.

X considered sleeping in hammocks in Central Park and threatened to march to the UN and set up camp on the grounds. But Y and other civil rights leaders arranged for X to stay at the rundown Hotel Theresa in predominantly black Harlem which subsequently became famous because X was visited there by Kruschev, Nasser and Nehru.

Identify X and Y.

Q 4. The October 1973 Yom Kippur War, known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War, showed the risks to Israel of underestimating dangers to national security, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem.

It is the classic intelligence failure in Israeli history and it happened because the military establishment was captivated and captured by what they called The Concept of Arab Intentions — a preset world view that did not contemplate the possibility of an all-out assault.

This failure ultimately to the creation of a certain rule in Israeli intelligence. Which rule is this?

Q 5. On 22 April 1994, X died. On 16 June 1994 Hunter Thompson, a journalist, published his obituary titled ‘He Was A Crook’ for X in The Rolling Stone. The following is an excerpt from the article:

“If the right people had been in charge of [X’s] funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. [X] was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal….His body should have been burned in a trash bin.” Identify X.

Q 6. In 1969 X had issued a decree to expel all Italians from his country. But in 2002, he bought 6.4 million shares in the Italian football club Juventus. X has also delivered a two-hour long speech at UN during which he expressed support for Somali pirates, called Obama his “son”, and claimed that Israel was responsible for JFK’s assasination. Who is X?

Q 7. Identify the person who printed this advertisement in the first page of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe in 1987.

Q 8. In 1979 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to X. In her speech she said: “Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace”.

She has previously taken the side of the Duvalier regime of Haiti, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Union Carbide following the 1984 Bhopal disaster, and visited Nicaragua to side with the CIA-backed Contras against the Sandinistas. Identify X.

Q 9. Put Funda:

Q 10. In 1967, X artist had asked his producer to come up with album art which depicted his Indian American heritage (Native American). The producer spent $5000 and come up with the image on the left. To this, X said, “You got it wrong…I’m not that kind of Indian”.

Identify X.

Answers:

1. Maneka Gandhi;

2. Assembly has 81 seats. Odd numbered Houses create a problem of numbers. BJP got 40 seats. Congress got 40 seats. Madhu Koda was an Independent Candidate who became CM.

3. X- Fidel Castro; Y- Malcolm X

4. The ‘Tenth Man’ rule. The Tenth Man is a devil’s advocate. If there are 10 people in a room and nine agree, the role of the tenth is to disagree and point out flaws in whatever decision the group has reached.

5. Richard Nixon;

6. Muhammad Gaddafi;

7. Donald J. Trump;

8. Mother Teresa;

9. The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or “bugs”) to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945.

10. Jimi Hendrix.

The Geopolitics and IR quiz is an annual quiz hosted by Sparsh Agarwal and Zainab Firdausi, courtesy the Quizzing Society at Ashoka.