It was on 5 April 2020. The country was into the 10th day of the world's largest lockdown and its citizens enthusiastically waiting to lighten up the diyas at 9 PM for 9 minutes.
My birthday fell on the same date(Apr 5). Among the wishes from friends and family, there came a greeting from a friend and a fellow quizzer from Bhubaneshwar. In the conversation that followed we planned a live COVID fundraiser quiz on TackOn's Facebook page.
Even before the clouds of janata curfew and lockdown loomed upon us, the quizzing community had bounced on to the limited live quizzes on platforms like Skype and Zoom. A couple of other Facebook/Instagram pages also hosted some live quizzes.
However, the credit goes to Nishant Nihar for pitching in an idea of fundraiser quiz and hosting it live on TackOn. We called it 'Social Animals - A Fundraiser Quiz'. On average we had 45-50 live participants taking part in the quiz and helped us raise a fund of around 16,000 Rs for an NGO named 'Project Raahat'.
Thus, we officially caught the flu! Thanks to all the participation and response to Social Animals quiz.
Then came a General quiz by myself in association with HomeRun Quizzes with equally enthusiastic participation from the audience as for the first one (In fact even more!). This had some 60 live participants and after the live stream ended, the viewership swell up to 15,000 in next 3 days!
Barrel: A quiz on the oil & gas industry in association with Petroleum Facts came next in line. Surprisingly, this particular quiz had seen active participation from across the globe.
Next, we came up with a Telugu-Tamil Bilingual quiz. This has opened up an entirely new avenue to us, which eventually turned into the initiative of the 8th Schedule Quizzes. A couple of well-known quizzers and quizmaster from different parts of the country and languages came in to compile and host quizzes in their respective languages.
These native language quizzes have fetched us the love of many people especially the non-quizzers. Eight quizzes in 8 different languages were hosted under this initiative and more are lined up in the next few weeks.
Read about native language quizzes here.
get a glimpse of other quizzes on our Facebook and YouTube channels