Wednesday, June 15, 2011

To Biz or not to Biz!

Vidit Bhargava
"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - This is knowledge"

The book opens with this beautiful quote by Confucius. The book being written by my friends Ravi Handa and Avinash Maurya.

To start with Biz World would easily have been mistaken to be another question set for those trying to enter the world of quizzing. But Fortunately they don't market their book as a quiz book, they call it a business awareness guide. (And the book is selling nicely!)
Biz World is a completely different take on the classical quiz books, which usually come from the pen of the BQC legend, Derek O'Brien. It doesn't open with a question bank straight away. In fact They don't even have questions for the major part of the book. Which i feel is very good. The book has information virtually about every brand in the market. But you will find this information a little vague sometimes, you may even ask, "what do i do with this sort of stuff". However this series of vague information is just what is required to make good questions in a quiz. No-one asks a direct question these days. Having said that, however large the circle of information may be, it seems to be less.

My real concern, however, is with the type of questions this book has, the quality is just quite basic to say the least. There are some good questions though but this book doesn't even take you as far as qualifying the prelims of quiz. However, the fact file in the beginning of the book helps a lot.

The Authors have taken the responsibility of rolling out Question of the Day placards on the internet. They are also very helpful.

The good thing about the book is that you don't have to read all at once. You may take reference from it, from time to time, it is just like a brand encyclopedia at your hands.

After all is said and done we reach to the debatable part. Are Quiz Books even necessary? If you read these books for preparing a quiz, then I shall call them a piece of junk. Who doesn't have access to books? Everyone has. If you prepare for a quiz from these books, you will end up having out-dated and common knowledge most of the time.

However on the other side of the coin, if we take these books as a fact file or a box of knowledge. They may be very beneficial for us. This implies even if you are not a quizzer. For there is nothing better than a well-informed man.

Summing it up: The Biz World trumps all other business awareness/quiz books. For Biz World is written by two quizzers who are "currently" quizzing and know today's trends. The Books by O'Briens and Basus are only helpful when it comes to their quizzing and not when it comes to a total awareness of our environment.

However, Biz World has a long way to go. Even with this much in the bag, readers will have to read a lot more. All I can say is, it is not the perfect but the only rational choice in the market for aspiring business quizzers and knowledge enthusiasts.

Rating: ***

I have attached some fundas and questions below, hope you like them, you can even answer them in the comments box.
You can find more questions and fundas, on this link: Click Here