India’s oldest woman quizzer reveals her secret to never-ending curiosity

Saranya Jayakumar, Jayashree Mohanka and Nirupama V.
| Photo Credit: S. Shivaraj

Decades ago, in the 1950s, when Chennai had no books tailored for quizzers looking to sharpen their skills, Saranya Jayakumar, now an 85-year-old inquisitive quizzer, spent long hours in the city’s libraries. Nose buried in books, she pored over newspapers and magazines and made it a habit to stay updated for a few quiz competitions held in Madras at the time.

“There were only two quiz competitions back then, one conducted by the student union and another by Professor Johnson while I was doing my literature degrees. I made sure to show up for both,” recalls Ms Saranya, who firmly believes being a ‘bookworm’ is the secret to a neverending curiosity. This quest for trivia took her to quiz clubs across the country, especially being a regular in the Kolkata quizzing scene, now she is known as India’s oldest woman quizzer.

Conferred the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ by Quiz Foundation of India on Sunday, Ms Saranya, even as she celebrated this win, pointed out a longstanding issue with the glaring lack of women in open quizzing in Chennai. “Between jobs, household duties, women do not always get the time for many such activities, unlike men do,” she notes.

To shake things up, she teamed up with top quizzers Jayashree Mohanka and Nirupama V. to host a women-themed quiz on Sunday, also celebrating International Women’s Day. “At the school and college level, girls are out there making a mark. But in open quizzing, the numbers drop. That said, by making quizzes more accessible, we can get more women step into it,” says Ms Nirupama.

The Women’s Day quiz was a full house, with 54 teams battling it out, some all-women, others mixed. The questions? A mix of everything from writer-activist Meena Kandasamy’s Mulligatawny Dreams and women in the Vietnam War to The Mindy Project and all things pop culture, curated by the three women quizzers. Hands shot up left and right as teams answered questions about Chennai’s first woman Mayor and aviation pioneers.

For those thinking about dipping their toes into the world of quizzing, Chennai now has plentiful quiz clubs, just a quick internet search away. But Ms Jayashree points out the art of quizzing happens only when you chase your curiosity. “Go into the depths of topics you love, only that sticks,” she adds. Ms Saranya agrees: “Read more, read often, because the thrill of getting an answer right will never get old.”