Join the club: Passion sustains K Circle, the oldest quizzing group in Hyderabad

K Circle Quizzing group is one of the oldest surviving quizzing groups of Hyderabad. The quizzing group celebrates its golden jubilee by hosting Kaikuu 2023, a quiz festival for the quizzers of India at the Bhaskara Auditorium, Hyderabad in October

No quick-fire rounds, buzzers, fancy gifts or hampers… only the joy of learning something new, finding answers to a question from clues as a team and celebratory high-fives in the end. Here is K-Circle Quiz Club (KC to its members), a 50-year-old quizzing group of Hyderabad, the oldest in the city. Nothing can stop this motley group of passionate quizzers from meeting every Saturday at 5pm, not even the city’s weekend traffic congestion.

The conference hall on the top floor of Columbus Hospital Institute of Psychiatry and De-addiction in Begumpet is where men and women of different age groups and walks of life — all K-Circlers and therefore avid quizzers— have gathered. Ten teams of have their eyes glued to a screen as quiz master Nitin Kishore Sai Samala, points towards a number in a screenshot of a PayTm transaction and asks: ‘What is the purpose of this number in front of the merchant’s name? How does it change or relate to currency notes? As murmurs fill the room, the quiz master hops from one group to another, asking for answers. The answers by the two teams are close. The right answer: Transaction counter, the number indicates the number of transactions made to that merchant that day and identifies if the transaction is valid.

With more than 40 questions on different topics, the two-hour session sees members test their memory and knowledge. Generations of Hyderabadis have known and experienced this passion for quizzing, owing to K-Circle.

With members as old as 63, Sivaram Mulugu, a senior cement industry executive to 16-year-old students Suhas Krishna and Sai Charan, of Chinmaya Vidyalaya and Gitanjali Senior School, the club founded by Srivats Iyengar in 1971 has a glorious history. “This was in 1969-72, during the first Telangana agitation, when schools and colleges suspended classes A group of people led by Srivats Iyengar launched a forum so that people could continue to learn,” recalls Devarajan Padmanabhan, who joined the group as a teenager in 1978. Although many such clubs were launched at the time, including a history and science club, only two survived, K-Circle and the Young Orators Club.

KC meetups took off with only 10 members, meeting on Fridays at the YMCA in Secunderabad. Now, 50 years later, with 2,500 weekly quizzes (no cash prize) and 50 annual events (held in auditoriums so that the money raised is given as cash prizes to encourage the hobby), its participants run into thousands (not all regular attendees but ardent admirers). A large part of the admiration stems from the exposure that the club has inadvertently given them.

Rohan Naidu’s connection with KC began in 2004 when he was eight. “The questions covering diverse topics opened the world to me; the notes I took, the books I read and the movies I watched after getting introduced to them shaped my worldview,” says the astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who is currently in Hyderabad.

KC gave leadership opportunities to Hyderabadis. Besides being a productive way to spend time, it was a platform to network, meet new people and discover professions. “We found mentors and got inspired by each other. We had doctors pursuing PhDs, some from IAS and IPS cadre and people from the advertising and banking industries too.”