A list of puzzling questions: The election edition

Editor’s note: Every week, we feature three questions from our quiz master Shantanu Sharma—who is a researcher-writer and has a side hustle as a professional quiz guru. He’d love to hear from you—so send your feedback/suggestions or just say ‘hi’ over at sharmashantanu312@gmail.com or @shantorasbox on Twitter.

How this works: Every correct answer is worth 10 points. If a question has multiple parts, each is worth 5 points. You have until Friday 12 pm to send in your answers to talktous@splainer.in or via DMs on Insta or Twitter. The correct answers will be published every Tuesday—as will the monthly leaderboard. The grand prize for the winner at the end of the month: a quarterly subscription for anyone of your choice—including the option of adding three months to your sub. That’s Rs 899 in value—so it’s pretty darn good:) Rule to note: this is all about who sends in the correct answers first.

The answers: to the previous week’s quiz are at the bottom.

One: Shown below are two older symbols of a political organisation. Identify the current symbol used by this particular organisation.

Two: Connect the two series of images to figure out an election-related invention.

(a) Two central public sector undertakings (PSUs) under the Defence ministry and the Department of Atomic Energy, respectively.

(b) Two design professors from IIT Bombay

Three: The image below is the poster of one of Satyajit Ray’s last directorial ventures. Keeping this edition’s theme in mind, which poster of a movie released in the last decade has an unintentional resemblance to this one?

 About last week’s quiz… 

Here are the answers to the third edition of the splainer quiz:

One: If you want to take a photo of this star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, you’ll have to pick a very different camera angle than the rest. Why is that? Who is the recipient of this star—someone who embodies both the gift of gab and the jab? Both parts carry 5 points.

Answer: The star commemorates Muhammad Ali. It is the only star mounted on a wall and not embedded on the pavement.

The Walk of Fame boasts 2,777 embedded stars that line the sidewalks of that 15-block stretch in Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles. Honouring luminaries in motion pictures, television, radio, live theatre, and recording since 1960, the sports entertainment category was added in 2023. Muhammad Ali was inducted in 2002 with boxing being considered a form of live performance. The tradition of pavement embedding was broken for him because he rejected the practice of having people walk on his name with reverence to the Prophet Muhammad. So, his star is mounted on a wall next to the Walk of Fame. 

Two: Connect the two elements below to arrive at a luminous Indian from the world of science.

(a) One of NASA’s four great satellite observatories

(b) A Google Doodle celebrating a discovery about the evolution of stars

Answer: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

S Chandrasekhar was one of the foremost astrophysicists of the 20th century winning the 1983 Nobel Prize. The top image is that of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the most powerful X-ray telescope. Named after Chandrasekar, it was deployed by the Columbia space shuttle on July 23, 1999.  The bottom image is from a 2017 Google Doodle marking his 107th birthday. It illustrates one of his biggest contributions, the Chandrasekhar limit, determining the fate of stars— whether ending life as white dwarfs or exploding in a supernova. Interestingly, his paternal uncle is another Nobel laureate, CV Raman.

Three: This avant-garde filmmaker embarked on a monumental adaptation of a sci-fi work during the mid-1970s. The production included an unusual line-up of celebrity cast and crew members. However, the price tag proved far too high for the studios, and his ambitious project remained unrealized. Name the herculean adaptation that a Canadian filmmaker recently succeeded in bringing to life?

Answer: Dune.

This is the image of Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky whose adaptation of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ is one of the greatest “what if” stories of SF cinema. His vision was operatic in scale, encompassing a sprawling narrative and an A-list cast, the dream team comprising Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí for acting, with Pink Floyd and Magma scoring the film. To judge by his screenplay, the film would have lasted 14 hours. His ambitious vision, however, proved too grand for Hollywood studios at the time. The David Lynch-directed ‘Dune’ came out in 1984 who did not want his name in the credits after the final cut. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s much-acclaimed ‘Dune’ (2021) delighted fans worldwide with its sequel ‘Dune: Part Two’ released last month. 

And the winners are…

Here are the top five scorers for the second week of April. Congratulations!