(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Lounging in the lobby of Radisson Blu, Siddhartha Basu chuckles to himself recalling what his father told him when he was 12 years old.
"It was 1967. An astrologer had told him that his son will be prominent in a very unusual field. So my father dutifully noted down: Neurosurgery, Nuclear Physician. Even in his wildest imagination, my father wouldn't have thought that this thing called quiz shows would happen," Basu says, still smiling, "And these question marks have followed me throughout life. I have been trying all along to replace it with exclamation marks."
If exclamation marks are what Basu has looked for, they are right there, disguised in shiny, bright cloaks of screaming success. Quizmaster Basu was down in Doha over the weekend to host the 19th edition of Indian Women's Association (IWA) Interschool Quiz Competition, at Birla Public School.
Basu's foray into quizscape was the famous Quiz Time in 1985, followed by successful hosting of shows such as Mastermind India and University Challenge for BBC. Of course, it was his company's production of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) € the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire € hosted by superstar Amitabh Bachchan in 2000, which launched him into major league.
With his wife Anita Kaul, Basu runs one of India's top TV production companies, BIG Synergy. Ever since they set it up in 1988, the company has produced some of the most popular shows such as KBC, Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, India's Got Talent, and Dus ka Dum. However, despite being a TV producer-director and also an actor, Basu has been most synonymous with quizzing - or more specifically, with being a Quizmaster.
Community turned the tables on Basu only to find that he is a master on both sides of it:
How different is it for you to devise massy, popular quiz shows as opposed to devising pure, hardcore quiz shows?
I enjoy them all. Each show has its different set of challenges. Each reaches people in a very different way; to each his own. Over the years, the kind of variety we have covered is proof. School and college quizzes are par for the course. It's been four years running for our quiz in Delhi's Tihar jail (the largest prison complex in South Asia) inmates. We did the TV show Kissa Khursi Ka, featuring only members of parliament as contestants - four of them went on to become chief ministers and union ministers. We have done one for neo-literates, as part of National Literacy Mission. We have also catered to the entire nuclear science community of India with a quiz devised for Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. We have formats, content, and we make those formats available to whatever specialisation it is. We have done gourmet quizzes, complete with sensory rounds where you sniff and taste foods. And then, we have done some very specialised quiz shows. TV is just the tip of the iceberg.
Does the quizmaster in you feel upset when you have to do something that's not qualitatively rich or you need to dumb down?
Not at all. And we don't dumb down. We try to reach out to people. You can put a Mastermind contestant on KBC, and even an early question may stump him. What's essential is that the mind is simulated. My analogy is high jump. If a three-feet-tall kid must attempt, I won't put the bar at a height of six feet and ask him to jump. I will begin with a height that suits him, let him hit his peak mid-way, and then I'll try and make him jump above that peak. You do that with everybody. Devising quizzes is partly science, art, and judgment.
So, whatever keeps people interested or engaged?
I would say engaged. Engagement is key. Quizzing is one of the few activities whether on TV or as a live event, that isn't passive. We try to build it as an interactive experience where everybody is jumping, including the last person in the back seats who nobody thought would even be interested in it. It's fun and celebratory. But the challenge is to engage at that level. The teams have to adapt and figure out what it is.
You mean anticipating the contestants' drive? Can you elaborate?
Yes. Some contestants come to KBC or other quiz shows to change their lives with the money they will win, but a lot of them, especially women, come for validation. That's because they never got their opportunities after a certain point. Particularly, for a lot of women, domesticity is the end of aspirations. One reason they come on the show is to say: Listen, I may be taking care of the house, the husband and the children, but I have interests outside that. I know about stuff. This is who I am. So when an old grandmother manages to come on the show, you must quiz her at her level. You can't say buzz off, I am only going to aim at that IIT/IIM (top degrees in India) fellow. You must engage that person on the merit.
KBC is a show that has been adapted in eight languages in India. Why do you think a show like KBC works so well?
The difference between KBC and a straight-up quiz show is that KBC is a lot more. It engages the heart as well. The reason why the KBC format has met with major global success is because while it is a kind of a knowledge game, it's more about a life changing in front of your eyes. You get to see the life of that person sitting on screen change, as it happens. Moreover, since India is so vast and diverse with such varied kinds of people, it's a way of finding out what's there. Our headlines and top stories are about only a limited kind of people like celebrities or people in power. But these are real people coming to the show with their own stories. So it becomes a window into that as well, as seen through a knowledge game.
Can you recall one of the many interesting people who were on the show?
In the Malayalam version of KBC, Ningalkkum Aakam Kodeeswaran on Asianet, last season, one of the biggest winners was a Mahout (an elephant rider-caretaker) who hasn't studied beyond school. But he is awesomely well-informed purely because of his range of interests and can hold his own against master quizzes. I think that's marvelous. He is also a proud man with great attitude. He won 50 lakh rupees. But he didn't want more than 75,000 rupees. When it came to bargaining for answers, he said he won't bargain and gave the rest away. So you get to see all kinds of people.
For 30 years, you seem to have carried the weight of this reputation of being the foremost quizmaster in India. How does it work for you?
It's not been a solo journey for one. And I have never had pretentions from my very first show Quiz time, of being a quizzer. But I have always been a quizmaster. What I mean is I am not among those who travel across the country just to be quizzed. I approach this whole area of quizzing in every medium as a communicator. I try to make that work for whoever it is. So if they are neo-literates who are just learning to read and write and feeling an amazing sense of empowerment, and suddenly all those signs mean something, you know, the writing on the wall, and they think wow, we are breaking through this wall, you try to capture that joy and the sense of getting there, of knowing about things, and it works. It gives you enormous emotional satisfaction apart from just a fantastic competition. So you do it at that level. Equally, if you have polymaths of the first order on Mastermind, that's a separate challenge and that's wonderful, too. Nothing pleases me as much as answers coming thick and fast. For me, the high is always when people get the answers.
Having been party to all the drama, what amuses or amazes you?
On KBC, it's always amazing how little people know. While on Mastermind, I was always amazed at how much people know. Years ago, on KBC, a Punjabi farmer was asked, how many metres in a kilometre and he answered 10,000. For a farmer who would certainly use a tractor, that was a surprise. Then there was a young, pretty Tamilian girl who was asked a joke question: Which of these is a popular sweetmeat € Tum Tum, Yum Yum, Kum Kum or Cham Cham? Cham Cham is a popular Bengali sweet. She named everything before locking on that. Her mother charged at me, fists pumping, and asked how could I ask such an irrelevant question to her daughter. But the joke was on us. Within a week, there were 50 marriage proposals for the girl.
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