Quizabled for a cause

Around seven years ago, three ardent quiz buffs got together to start their own quizzing company. Since then, they’ve tickled the grey cells of a plethora of quiz enthusiasts with their varied questions. Meet Sharath Babu, Akshath A and Himadri Banerjee, the brains behind 4 Edge Quizzing Solutions who are all set to conduct a one-of-its-kind quiz for children with disabilities. “We formed our venture during our college days when we’d host quizzes for schools. We wanted to showcase good-quality, engaging content to our client schools, because we felt there was a big gap in the type and quality of content in school quizzes when compared to the quizzes we attended in the first year of college. We also have Anand Bhat in our team, who joined us two years ago,” reveals Himadri.

Since the inception of 4 Edge, the trio has gone on to host quizzes for schools, colleges, corporates, start-ups and NGOs around south India and abroad. However, they are most kicked about organising a quiz for differently-abled kids. Throwing more light on the event, they say, “To celebrate International Day for the Disabled, Seva-in-Action (SiA) is organising their annual event The Quizabled in collaboration with LTI, Bengaluru and us. It will be a competition for kids with disabilities from special and regular schools across the Bengaluru district. The participants will be divided into four groups —intellectually disabled, autism and cerebral palsy, visual impaired and hearing impaired.” In order to reach out to more children, they’re conducting the prelims division-wise across the city on December 8 to select contestants for the semi-finals and finals. “The finals of Quizabled will be held on December 16 at Sri Godwad Bhavan. The participating children will be awarded a variety of goodies with winners being given tablet PCs, special devices and more,” says Hemadri.

Ask them what topics the quiz would cover and they say, “General knowledge topics like current affairs — national and international, history and culture, science, business, geography, sports, entertainment and Karnataka state facts. Also, we have different themes like food, cartoons etc for those with intellectual disabilities. The medium of the quiz is Kannada and English.”

As talk veers back towards the lads, they reveal that they all hail from nammooru and juggle full-time jobs along with their quiz events. As for the quizzing culture in Bengaluru, they call it very vibrant and happening. “In fact, we have one of the most active quizzing circuits in the country. There are plenty of quizzes for schools, colleges and for the open category. Our city also has the distinction of having quite a few quizzing start-ups which are doing well. In the future, we hope to push for this thing called an online treasure hunt (OTH), which is a quiz where participants are allowed to Google. Apart from doing regular quizzes, we hope to go digital with the OTH,” states Himadri.