Tamil Nadu - Tiruchi   

They get together to make a ‘trademark’

S. Aishwarya

MENSA Club of BHEL enters into its 15th year

Good performance: Varadharajan, Principal of R.S.K. Higher Secondary School, distributing prizes to students in Tiruchi on Tuesday.

TIRUCHI: If you are the kind of the person who is under the impression that quizzing fraternity is male dominated, it is time you visit the MENSA club of BHEL. For, the founder secretary of the club is an unassuming homemaker Nirmala Kannappan.

Her daily chores have never been a hitch for her passion to learn about interesting facts and update on current affairs. “I think about ways to frame a question in interesting ways while I’m cooking. I actually land on ingenious ideas when I cook,” quips Ms. Kannappan, who has inspired over 50 children of the township to take up quizzing as a prime hobby.

The club members get together every week to share and keep track of the curious little facts they come across. The sheer thrill of cracking the trivia has made the club members stick gleefully to the club and made it enter into its 15th year on Monday.

The annual day celebration was yet another occasion for the quizzer-members to gobble as many trivia as possible. The competition, conducted to mark the anniversary, had an overwhelming participation of 16 kids of primary classes and 18 higher class students. The students, all from R. S. K. Higher Secondary School, were in for a surprise when their Principal P. Varadharajan chimed in to distribute the prizes.

Major attraction of the quiz was the club’s trademark round ‘Jazz 2k,’ in which the students were posed a host of questions at fast pace and were expected to answer the previous question, even while grasping the current question thrown at them.

For seniors, it was the newly introduced round ‘Dosa to Pizza,’ that sparkled the merriment. Questions were based on evolution of a concept or historic movement.

“I make it a point to introduce new rounds every year. It keeps up the spirit of students,” says Ms. Kannappan, who has got into the habit of jotting down quirky facts collected from newspapers and internet and urges the aspiring quizzers to “look for the unusual in every news story they get to read.”

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