Suchetha finds life’s answers as quizmaster
View(s):By Kaveesha Fernando
Quizmaster Suchetha Wijenayake’s nine-year- old son occasionally reading out the questions and walking from table to table at a restaurant where the Colombo Pub Quiz is being held, greeting participants (and returning carrying snacks much to the chagrin of his parents, especially Suchetha’s wife Mishty) is a familiar sight for ‘Quiz’ regulars. And this is just the kind of relaxed environment Suchetha as Quizmaster wants to foster.
However, don’t be fooled by the friendliness of participants – some of them play to win, although Suchetha says that something that he, along with everyone else, sometimes forgets, is that Quiz is not about competition. “The purpose of Quiz isn’t to make people feel bad for not knowing things but to make them feel good for knowing,” he says, adding “I’m no different to the guy standing in the corner playing a guitar.”
An evening with friends at the Colombo Pub Quiz and Suchetha pictured on our Magazine cover. Pic by Nilan Maligaspe
Setting the questions is a challenge because he often overestimates how much people know, plus the sheer task of setting 60 questions each week (six rounds of 10 questions) is no mean feat!
He always tries to have five moderately easy questions, three medium difficult questions and two questions which he describes as those that “only those in the top 10th percentile of geek/nerdiness would get”.
To Suchetha, discovering the Colombo Pub Quiz was almost like finding his purpose in life. Dragged for a quiz for the first time around 2008 by a friend, he says that he had a moment where he went “Oh! I have found my people and all this worthless knowledge in my cranium is actually useful.”
He explains too that a pub is not a bar, and while Sri Lanka may not have a strong pub culture, in the UK, the local pub is where people go to grab a bite to eat – a communal hangout spot, a bit like a coffee shop.
In around 2011, when then Quizmaster Jehan Mendis was not in Colombo to run the quiz, he would let some of the regulars run it in turns, and Suchetha was always eager to have a chance – it was his first taste of being on “the other side of the chair”. After Jehan migrated, it was done by Malaka Padmalal and then after the “lost years” (the COVID pandemic in 2020/2021), Malaka having other commitments, asked Suchetha to take over.
An unofficial historian of sorts (he’s one who points at old decrepit cafes and paints a vivid image of their golden era with tales of how actresses fresh from a film premiere would frequent them along with other celebrities), Suchetha seems to have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things.
In fact, Suchetha is very precise and philosophical in his outlook. Ask him what he does for a living, and he quips “karapu deyakuth naha, nokarapu deyakuth naha” (there’s nothing I have done and nothing I haven’t), and this appears to have been a pattern throughout his life. He was born in Colombo, but when his father, an engineer, migrated to Nigeria when he was a toddler, Suchetha found himself shuttling between Sri Lanka and Nigeria every six months.
Studying at Mahanama College, he had to ask his friends for their books and notes when he returned and attempt to catch up on what he had missed – a task that his mother also helped him with. He didn’t fare too badly passing the Royal College Grade 5 entrance exam (an exam the school used to hold in addition to the scholarship exam), and moving to Royal.
This wouldn’t be his last school. During the JVP troubles with his studies disrupted for over a year, he did his London O/Ls at Gateway, then went back and did his Local O/Ls. Choosing to take the London A/Ls, he started a US degree (in Computer Science) in Sri Lanka and then studied part of it in Oklahoma before returning to help run his parents’ nursing home. Working in many places including TNL Radio, he was a Linux advocate who promoted the use of free and open source software across Sri Lanka around 2005.
Seeing as he missed barbecue the way he had it in the US, he decided to start Fat Guy BBQ in 2011 (using the cooking knowledge he learnt in the US to make smoked barbeque). Currently, Suchetha runs Fat Guy BBQ, while also involved in his parents’ retirement home after his mother passed away last year. And he is also an IT consultant.
Despite a busy work life Suchetha still runs ‘Quiz’ and the joy it gives him is evident. For him, a well-run quiz evokes a few responses which he watches out for. The “I feel like I know this” response, the dopamine hit of getting an answer right and the “man! I told you so” response, where someone guessed the right answer, their teammate wrote the wrong answer so they lost a point. As he sees it, the Quiz is a relationship between three parties. The venue has to be happy to host it, the participants have to be happy with the questions and the venue and he has to be happy that he’s able to host it well.
Above all though, the reason Suchetha feels that the quiz is his purpose in life is because it creates unity. “It doesn’t promote hate, it promotes unity and the greatest contribution someone can make to society is to promote unity in some form or the other,” he says.
| In search of a homeThe Colombo Pub Quiz is looking for a restaurant or pub to hold the quiz on a midweek evening. Quiz registration opens at 7.30 p.m. and questions start at 8 p.m. To find out more on the days and venues of Quiz, see: https://colombopubquiz.com/ | |
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