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Team Inmaniacs
Mad about quizzing
Why is Inmaniacs — possibly India’s oldest active quiz team — named so? Nope, they are not a bunch of lunatics; rather the name was derived from IIM Calcutta’s telegraphic address Inman — a concept alien in today’s world. The team was conceived by a bunch of IIMC students spearheaded by Gautam Ghosh (11th batch/1974-1976) or GG in January 1976, making a modest beginning with the now defunct Rangers Open Quiz and the JS Lipton Quiz in October of that year.

It remained a team of IIMC alumni till about the mid-1980s, with three or all four members of the team being past students of the Joka B-school. But with Calcutta ceasing to be the professional destination of IIMC grads, the team had to look for members from other spheres.

Ghosh, who schooled in Patna before taking an electrical engineering degree from IIT Kanpur, now remains the only IIMC alumnus in the Inmaniacs team. But it’s a tribute to his perseverance that the team has survived — he is known to coax and cajole lazy quizzers to get out of their homes on a Sunday afternoon and head to a quiz.

Inmaniacs has had the distinction of having won most of the regular open quizzes that were held in Calcutta — the DI Open, Eddie Hyde Quiz, Grail Club Open and the Argus Open. It has additionally won the National Final of the Round Table Open Quiz in 1978, which incidentally was India’s first national-level open quiz. It has continued to perform well in recent quizzes as well and won the Grand KQF Quiz at last week’s Kolkata Quiz Festival.

What has been the secret of Inmaniacs’s success and longevity? “A combination of love for the pastime, hoping to win, and having fun. One basic guiding principle of Inmaniacs is that, while we have been competitive, we have also looked at the lighter side of quizzing, and have never played dirty. We have taken the QMs errors — and we have encountered many — in our stride,” says Ghosh.

There’s been a long list of quizzers who have been part of Team Inmaniacs over the years — Partha Datta, Pracheta Mukherjee, Indrajit Gupta, Firoza Ardhesir, Ian Zachariah, Dayita Datta and more recently Anirudh Chari and Malavika Banerjee.

But GG has been the glue, keeping the team intact and getting members if he feels they fit the bill. Ask any recent Inmaniac, they will tell you of the afternoon calls.