Literary Fest Quiz Questions

Questions:

1. Whose lines are these:
Oh, what is man? A wretched being
Tossed upon the tide of time
All its rocks and whirlpools seeing
Yet denied the power of fleeing
Waves and gulfs of woe and crime;
Doomed from life’s first bitter breadth
To launch upon a sea of death
Without a hope, without a stay
To guide him upon his weary way?

2. Who said:
11. Sudden veer of wind and rain
Showering misery through the land,
The warlords are clashing anew–
Yet another Golden Millet Dream.
Red banners leap over the Ting River
Straight to Lungyen and Shanghang.
We have reclaimed part of the golden bowl
And land is being shared out with a will.

3. O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains
Where Russian exiles toil in chains
It moved with noiseless tread;
And as it slowly glided by
There followed it across the sky
The spirits of the dead.

The Ural peaks by it were scaled
And every bar and barrier failed
To turn it from its way;
Slowly and surely on it came,
Heralded by its awful fame,
Increasing day by day.

On Moscow’s fair and famous town
Where fell the first Napoleon’s crown
It made a direful swoop;
The rich, the poor, the high, the low
Alike the various symptoms know,
Alike before it droop.
4. When your mother has grown older,

When her dear, faithful eyes
No longer see life as they once did,
When her feet, grown tired,

No longer want to carry her as she walks –
Then lend her your arm in support,
Escort her with happy pleasure.
The hour will come when, weeping, you
Must accompany her on her final walk

5.
My childhood’s home I see again,

And sadden with the view;

And still, as memory crowds my brain,

There’s pleasure in it too.
O Memory! thou midway world

‘Twixt earth and paradise,

Where things decayed and loved ones lost.

In dreamy shadows rise

6.
Maithreem Bhajatha , Akhila Hruth Jethreem,
Atmavateva paraan api pashyatha
Yuddham thyajatha , Spardhaam Tyajata , thyajatha Pareshwa akrama aakramanam
Jananee Prthivee Kaamadughaastey
JanakO Deva: Sakala Dayaalu
Daamyata Datta Dayathvam Janathaa
Sreyo Bhooyaath Sakala Janaanaam
Sreyo Bhooyaath Sakala Janaanaam
Sreyo Bhooyaath Sakala Janaanaam
Meaning: With friendship please serve,
And conquer all the hearts,
Please think that others are like you,
Please forsake war for ever,
Please forsake competition for ever,
Please forsake force to get,
Some one else’s property,
For mother earth yields all our desires,
And God our father is most merciful,
Restrain, donate and be kind,
To all the people of this world.
Let all the people, live with bliss,
Let all the people live with bliss,
Let all the people live with bliss

7. Whose house is named Styles?

8. He returns after 12 years of exile in Germany to investigate mass suicides and hopefully meet up with a woman. He meets and is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. Which work is this?

9.Name the four poets who are considered to be the pillars of the Chhayavaadi school of Hindi literature.

10. To which philosopher do we attribute the expression: golden mean?

11. Who invented the word assassination?

12. Eastcheap scandalized as royal playboy imitates clouds, smothers sun, gallivants around with merry, drunken friends. Wine, women, and song in abundance! Plump Jack reported missing, possibly dead, while war looms on horizon! The devil will be given his due in what famous history play?

13. How does the world know the music director Anandghan better?

14. Who said: The Bhagawad Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity”?

15. Satyajit Ray based his film GHANASHATRU on which play of Ibsen?

16. Name the writer who too refused to take the Nobel Prize but had the The Academy refused his refusal. “This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.” His accepted the prize on behalf of his deceased father in 1989.

17. In the context of the Nobel Prize what is common to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henrik Ibsen, Joan Robinson, Thomas Edison.

18. “She could not accept the principle that appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by slander concerning a researcher’s private life.” Was justification for this Nobel winner to accept the award contrary to advice regarding a scandal: who is the winner and what the scandal?

19. Talking about refusals to accept the Nobel what is common to the three German Nobel laureates — Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt and Gerhard Domagk?

20.What was unique about the Swedish Poet winning the Nobel Prize for Literature Erik Axel Karlfeldt who won it for Literature in 1918?

21. Name Shakespeare’s longest play and his shortest.

22. From which University did Shakespeare, graduate?

23. Who in 1450 invented movable type, thus revolutionising printing?

24. Who wrote the maxim ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am)?

25. What is the Old English heroic poem, surviving in a single copy dated around the year 1000, featuring its eponymous 6th century warrior from Geatland in Sweden?

26. What was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson?

27. By what name is the writer François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) better known?

28. Which pioneering American poet and story-teller wrote The Fall of the House of Usher?

29. Which statesman won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature?

30. Which French writer declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964?

31. Who is the patron king of comedians?

32. A harsh critic of Victorianism, this Norwegian playwright revolutionized drama with works like Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. Who is the person?

33. The definitive collection of them was compiled by Phaedrus during the 1st Century C.E., and had an immense impact of later writers, Name these short tales.

34. Ruskin Bond’s work A Flight of Pigeons inspired which Shashi Kapoor film?

35. Gollapudi Maruthi Rao’s play – the first in Telugu on Sino Indian war was also published by the state government. Name the play?

36. He created a child character called Budugu. Many other memorable characters like Radha, Gopalam, Contractor (in Muthyala Muggu), Tutti (in Mister Pellam) in Modern Telugu Literature/Cinema. Who is he?

37. What is common to: Karma Cola, A River Sutra, Raj?

38. Who is the living brother of Lord Elmsworth?

39. What is common to Rupert Baxter, Lavender Briggs, Rupert Smith, Monty Bodkin?

40. Born in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant and immediately ate all the pasta and lasagna in sight, thus developing his love and obsession for lasagna. Who is this?

Answers:
1. Branwell Bronte.
2. Mao Tse Tung.
3. The Influenza by Winston Churchill
4. Adolf Hitler
5. Abraham Lincoln
6. Chandrashekar Saraswati
7. Agatha Christie after her first novel Mysterious Affair at Styles
8. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
9. Mahadevi Varma, Jaishankar Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant, Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’.
10. Aristotle
11. Shakespeare
12. Henry IV Part I
13. Lata Mangeshkar
14. Aldous Huxley
15. An Enemy of the People.
16. Boris Pasternak.
17. None of them were awarded the Nobel!!
18. Marie Curie. Then a widow, Curie had an affair with a married scientist, Paul Langevin — a former pupil of Pierre Curie. Love letters were involved, eventually leading to a duel between Langevin and the editor of the newspaper that had printed them.
19. Were forbidden by Adolf Hitler to accept their prizes.
20. He did not accept because he was Secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. He was given the award posthumously in 1931. This was allowed because the nomination was made before Karlfeldt died — no candidate may be proposed after death.
21. Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors.
22. He, never attended university.
23. Johannes Gutenberg
24. René Descartes (1596-1650, French philosopher and mathematician, in his work Discours de la Méthode, 1637.)
25. Beowulf.
26. Lewis Carroll
27. Voltaire
28. Edgar Allen Poe
29. Sir Winston Churchill.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980 – apparently he declined because he had an aversion to being ‘institutionalised’)
31. St. Vitus
32. Henrik Ibsen.
33. Aesop’s Fables.
34. Junoon
35. Vandemataram.
36. Mullapudi Venkata Ramana
37. All works by Gita Mehta.
38. Gallahad
39. All Secretaries of Lord Elmsworth in PG Woodhouse works.
40. Garfield