ডাকবাংলা

It was the mid-Eighties, early days in Indian television, when ITV were putting together a pilot for a quiz show named Safecracker. It was to be hosted by Partha Basu, a member of the famed Motley Crew team, who were arch rivals to Dalhousie Institute and Neil O’Brien in Calcutta quizzing. The producers needed a compere to introduce the quizmaster, jolly up the audience and get things moving. And thought of their friend, then a manager at the Taj Hotel. That friend, already in a suit as he worked at the Taj, reached Kamani Auditorium on his trusty moped, literally on ten-minutes’ notice, did a breezy introduction and was back at work within an hour. 

That Safecracker pilot featured many familiar faces. Academic Kanti Vajapyee, journalists Anita Kaul Basu and Paran Balakrishan as participants, Sagarika Ghose as the scorekeeper and Partha Basu as quiz master. But after seeing the pilot, the ITV executives decided that the one person they needed to make this show a success was the man who made the introductions. They offered him  a job with ITV and a princely sum of
Rs 1,000 an episode to host the show. Quiz Time was born. 

To be fair, till then all the waves that Siddharth Basu planned to make were as an actor and director. After a childhood in schools around the country, thanks to a Boxwalla father, Basu joined St. Stephens studying for a Bachelor’s degree in English literature. He immediately took to theatre and was one of the founder members of Barry John’s Theatre Action Group (TAG), with a standout performance  in and as Oedipus in the Ted Hughes adaptation of Seneca’s version. Those were heady days in Delhi theatre and that TAG group included the likes of Manohar Singh, Roshan Seth, Pankaj Kapur, Lillette Dubey and Mira Nair. Babu, as his friends know him, was one of its brightest lights. 

After a Master’s degree in English, Babu spent a few years making documentaries with TVNF, before deciding that a stable job with a group like the Taj was important once he and college sweetheart Anita Kaul decided to start a family.

Their son Aditya was born after that first schedule in 1985, and before he was out of his diapers, Siddhartha Basu and Quiz Time were already massive hits. Quizzing had always been a school and college co-curricular activity, with only Calcutta having an Open  Quiz circuit at the Dalhousie Institute. But Babu’s clean cut good lucks and pitch perfect delivery made quizzing a household addiction, 9 pm every Sunday evening. 

That first schedule of Quiz Time featured the likes of Rajdeep Sardesai for St. Xavier’s Mumbai and Raghuram Rajan and Jayant Sinha for IIT Delhi, but it was always clear that the real star was Siddhartha Basu. 

What made the show work? The truth was that most quizzes, on television or live events, had people pottering about on stage reading questions from chits often with their back to the audience on subjects that were often of no interest to the average person. And most college and open quizzes remained that way for a long time. 

Babu was a comparative stranger to the quizzing world  and therefore treated each quiz just like any other stage event, a show where the audience was more important than the nerds on stage. During those first few years of Quiz Time, he would also be doing scores of live shows around the country. Each of those would feature catchy music, lights on cue and a high-energy entrance from the quiz master. It took quizzing to completely new audiences. I remember personally going to Silchar and being absolutely gobsmacked to find that thanks to Quiz Time and Siddhartha Basu, quiz shows were actually ticketed events. Even being chosen as hostess, a la Quiz Time hostesses Kavita Agarwal or Radha Seth, was a signal honour. These quizzes even featured early computer systems for scoring, and one of the first to operate one of those systems on a Limca Book of Records quiz was a certain Chetan Bhagat!

Once Quiz Time became a regular feature, Babu and his wife Anita ‘Rosa’ Kaul Basu started their own production company, Synergy, and produced their shows under that banner. They were really three of them; Babu, Rosa and Karun Prabhakar. Rosa and Karun took care of all of the logistics, administration and accounts while Babu was allowed to pursue his passion of making the best shows possible. And boy, was he demanding!

As someone with a theatre background, Babu needed every detail to be perfect. And he would always manage to find the places and people to make that perfect product. It could mean taking hundred  strong television crews around the country to shoot the finale for Mastermind in locations like Neemrana and the City Palace in Jaipur. Or finding a graduate from the School of Planning and Architecture who had just the kind of musical sensibility to make his shows perfect. Sawan Dutta is now well-known for her amazing Bengali aunty  Metronome videos on subjects like Boroline and Kosha Mangsho, but her first assignment was to make music for Synergy Shows.

Sawan remembers being absolutely bowled over on meeting her schoolgirl crush for the first time in Zoom studios while she was going around with her demo tape. After commissioning her, he landed up at her home studio and wanted to listen in while she composed. After ten minutes of this, Sawan told him she couldn’t work like this. He left but promised to be back that evening. Sawan locked her studio and went off somewhere else to compose. When she came back, there were samosas and sweets and a lovely note wishing her the very best at her doorstep. It totally broke the ice and  Sawan and Babu, both perfectionists,  have collaborated on scores of productions ever since.

Other products of the Synergy ‘gharana’ included a budding footballer from Karun’s college, Bhagat Singh, who had a talent for seeing pictures in his head. Shoojit Sircar was an editor on Style Today, a Synergy production, and later directed many Synergy productions before his illustrious film career. Shireen Bhan was a researcher on A Question of Answers before moving to business journalism and stardom and actor Joy Sengupta was another stage performer who Babu thought would be a perfect show host. 

I met Siddhartha Basu for the first time around three years later, in the third and final edition of Quiz Time. By that time, Synergy was producing the show, and it was being shot a studio in Hauz Khas. I don’t remember the first sentence I spoke when I met him, the second definitely was, ‘I want to work with you’. He flashed his high voltage smile at the time, and amazingly enough, a decade later, there I was, working with him. 

It wasn’t easy. Babu demanded an attention to detail that drove laid-back Calcutta quizzers like me crazy. It was a lovely question, did I need to find two more sources? And  I had absolutely no idea how important sponsors were to all events. One famous time at the Saturday Club, I had designed a general quiz for Nokia to be presented by Babu. It turned out that the one round that I thought was a bit of a drag was the Nokia communications round, so I took that out. Babu, secure in the knowledge that I would design a good quiz, came a few minutes before the event and asked me which round was the Nokia round. When I happily told him I had taken it out, he was horrified, but he went on stage and started presenting while I feverishly got a round ready backstage. We made it, and to Babu’s eternal credit, he never spoke of it again. 

Babu’s biggest single contribution to quizzing was that instead of looking at it as an activity for nerdy kids and adults, he used the game play as a vehicle to reach very different audiences. In Babu’s head, quizzes were a medium to get a message across. Projects included Akshar Mela, which was on Doordarshan and aimed at neo-literates, an annual quiz for undertrials at Tihar Jail hosted over the years by actor Gajraj Rao and Radha Seth and even a nuclear science quiz for Bhabha Atomic Research Centre scientists held at the premises. 

Synergy has produced quiz Show for Members of Parliament, Kissa Kursi Ka for Zee, where Babu remembers the MPs repeatedly demanding the correct answers before they took the stage, a film quiz show featuring Boman Irani, a self-confessed film trivia nut, and Newswiz, where Rajdeep Sardesai played host for a current affairs show. 

And he has been the man in the ear for the biggest presenters on Indian television, the likes of Shahrukh, Salman and Amitabh Bachchan.  After almost two decades and 800-odd episodes of KBC, Amitabh still follows Babu’s commands to the letter, and two decades on, is still not told if an answer is correct or incorrect. Babu, a perfectionist himself, still speaks of the detailing on pronunciation and presentation that the Big B puts in before every show. 

And this attention to detail is something researchers and producers will ruefully tell you is something Babu brings to every one of his productions, however small or comparatively insignificant.

In January this year, I was presenting the preliminary rounds of a quiz show for Tree of Knowledge, Babu and Rosa’s  new entity. And I was both excited and a bit apprehensive to be presenting for the first time live on Zoom, with Babu directing remotely. It was fairly nerve-wracking and I was delighted that the episodes looked good. Two weeks after we had completed shooting, Babu called up to ask me to join him for a Facebook Live event to launch the series. He started outlining the specific rounds and schools we should discuss on the show and I was a complete blank as I struggled to remember the episodes. After a few minutes, Babu realized that he knew far more about the shows that I had presented, and gently asked me to have a proper look on YouTube before we did the Facebook Chat.

And I did. It was Babu after all, and I couldn’t let him down.

Read in Bengali