Barefoot 2020 to be held in Delhi on March 21-22

 India's biggest sports quizzing festival, Barefoot, will hold its ninth edition on March 21-22 in the national capital. Like the previous years, the event will see several quizmasters come together from different parts of the country to conduct quizzes on different sporting sub-topics.

The first quiz of the event is 'Grace and Glory' -- the women in sports quiz. It will be followed by 'Citius, Altius and Fortius', a quiz on the Olympic.

The second day of quizzing action begins with the football quiz called 'Among the Thugs'. Following the football quiz in the line-up of the most attended quizzes of previous Barefoot festivals, 'Beyond a Boundary' - The Cricket Quiz and 'When Pride Still Mattered', The Sports Quiz.

Explaining the names of each of the sub-events, co-founder of Barefoot India Neelesh Saran remarked, "We wanted people to be intrigued, even before they came for the quiz. It takes a minute to look up and find out that they all derive themselves from popular book titles, but you need to pick up your phone or open your laptop and do that."

Apart from the annual event in Delhi, Barefoot has also hosted six more editions in Mumbai, Kolkata and Durgapur over these years.

"It's heartening to see so many participants every year. When we started this almost a decade ago, the idea behind it was to get people to know more about sports than they are generally fed by regular newspapers and magazines.

The popularity of this festival which attracts people from all over the country tells me we have possibly been able to achieve some of that. Some of the answers might stump you but more often than not, one would go back home, having developed a deeper interest in reading about sports and knowing more about our sporting icons," Saran said.

Last year, the organisers also put together an e-book on cricket quizzing. An anthology of over a thousand questions on the gentleman's game, it was careful put together by Amit Sinha.

Commenting upon what sets this compendium apart, Sinha said, "This was a one of a kind event when it started. Now we have sports quiz festivals across the country and that's very encouraging to say the least -- as long as we can urge more and more people to watch and follow sports more intrinsically, I think we would have achieved what we set out to do.

Emphasizing the need to sustain the movement, he added, "Our book, which we released last year before the World Cup in England received a great response too. That, I think is a legacy for the quizzes. We would want to not restrict ourselves to these two days every year and indulge in more of that moving forward." IANS