The Quiz Foundation of India, Chennai (or QFI) is a non-profit organization aiming to popularize quizzing in the city and also provide a forum for quizzers to meet and interact regularly.
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The first meeting of the QFI was convened sometime in 1987 by C.P.Ramesh at C-2, Parkland Apartments, Harrington Road in Chetpet. It was attended by four others – Sujatha, Gopal Kidao, Diwakar Pingle and Navin Jayakumar and they reportedly had tea and samosas while answering a few quiz questions.
The Quiz Foundation of India, or QFI as it is better known, has around 50-odd regular members who meet every alternate Sunday at 10 a.m for a quiz conducted by one or two of its members. Since March 2008, the quizzes are being held at the P. S. Senior Secondary School.
Apart from the fortnightly quizzes, there are two annual events on the QFI calendar - the QFI Grandmaster Quiz and the QFI Open Quiz. Members of the QFI frequently organise and conduct quizzes for a number of schools, colleges and companies based in and around the city.
The QFI Grandmaster Quiz, traditionally held at the beginning of each year, is for individuals and aims to identify the best quizzer for that year. This event was first held in the year 2002. The winner for each year usually conducts the next year's edition of the quiz. The list of Grandmasters so far is as follows:
2002 - Samanth Subramanian
2003 - Rajiv Rai
2004 - Vinod Ganesh
2005 - Samanth Subramanian
2006 - Jayakanthan
2007 - Swaminathan Ganesh
2008 - Samanth Subramanian
2009 - Kiran Vijayakumar
2010 - Rajiv Rai
2011 - Gopal Kidao
The QFI Open Quiz is a general quiz open to both members and non-members. It was first held in June 2005 and witnessed a turnout of around 125 teams of three members each. Since then, four more highly successful editions have been conducted. The quizmaster team for the first five editions has comprised Vinod Ganesh, Krishnamurti Ganesh and Vikram Rajan. Since 2010, the quiz setters are G.Swaminathan, Samanth Subramanian and R.Jayakanthan, with the quizmasters of the past helping them out. The winning teams so far:
2005 - 'Know Brainers’ (Gopal Kidao, Rajiv Rai and Rajen Prabhu)
2006 - 'Memory Bank' (Saranya Jayakumar, Sivakumar and Avinash Mudaliar)
2007 - 'QED' (Samanth Subramanian, Swaminathan Ganesh and Gopal Kidao)
2008 - ‘Tequila Mockingbird’ (Rajiv Rai, Rajen Prabhu and Jayakanthan R)
2009 - ‘QED' (Samanth Subramanian, Swaminathan Ganesh and Jayakanthan R)
2010 - A tie between 'Metaquizziks' (Arul Mani, Kiran Vijayakumar and Mitesh Agarwal) and 'Insignificant Others' (Sankhya, Vijay Sarathy and Sreeram)
2011 - 'Metaquizziks' (Arul Mani, Kiran Vijayakumar and Mitesh Agarwal)
There is no membership fee required to attend the meetings but a nominal amount Rs.150 is collected to enable access to a private mailing list in which the questions asked during the meetings are circulated. Apart from this, there is another public mailing list which is open to everyone who wishes to join. Meeting invitations and other general announcements are generally made on this list. This list can be accessed here http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/qfi/