Tips and tricks for making Tambola/Bingo/Housie interesting

One of the most popular pages on my site is the one about Dumb Charades. I remember from back in school/college that dumbcharades was one of the most popular games played within a group, of course next to Antakshari. Another game very popular in India (and, as i found out, very popular in Cyprus too) is the game of Tambola. It is also known as Bingo or Housie.
When i was working/staying in bangalore, our apartment used to organise Bingo once a month with the tickets priced at 2 rupees each. We used to be 5 guys (fresh from college s/w engineers) staying together. While other bought 1 or 2 tickets each, we used to go and buy 10 to 15 tickets each , virtually dictating the way the event was conducted. Others didn't complain, for we contributed to the big prize money in the pool. But, more often than not, we cornered most of the prizes due to the heavy probability in our favour.
I have been conducting Bingo sessions in our outdoor events at work for few years now. I do it a bit differently and as far as i know, it has been well received. Traditionally Bingos (or is it Bingoes) have cash prizes for the first five, the three rows and a full house, the cash prizes coming from the sale of the tickets. In the tambola events i organise, i do give out cash prizes, but also lot of other small gifts which can be souvenirs, fridge magnets, tshirts and pracically anything else which is not so expensive. If i do manage to get sponsors, then the big gifts come out. So, if you are organising a bingo, try to get a budget for it and then buy many small gifts and give them out apart from the cash prizes. if you don't get a budget, make a guess as to the amount of money you will collect and then pre-buy gifts for that amount.
Now that you have so many gifts, how are you going to give them away if there are only 4 prizes (3 rows + 1 full house)? This is where you have to do things differently. i have given below the list (in random order) of all bingo "events" for which i have given away prizes. You can pick and choose from the list below based on the number of gifts you have, your interest level in organising the event, the time available for the event (more the prizes, more the time ) and the interest level of the players.

• Anyone with the number 1 on their ticket. If all players have bought the full column, change it to - Anyone with number 1 on their topmost ticket - i usually start off with this one giving all the ppl 1 cent/1 rupee as a prize!
• Apart from the three rows, you can also give a prize for the first 4 columns i.e. the first and the last number on the first and the last row.
• If you are playing Bingo with a group of really enthusiastic people, you can also add prizes for the 5 columns on a ticket. Each column is not defined as the column appearing on the ticket, but as the respective numbers. Eg: 1st column would be the 1st number on each row irrespective of where the numbers actually are.
• It will be a morale-booster to also have a unlucky-one prize for the one who is the last to get a number on his ticket.
• If your group contains people of both sexes and of different ages, you can give prizes based on boys/girls or kids/parents/grand parents etc i.e a prize to the kid with the most/least number of numbers marked on a ticket.
  
• You can also play around with mathematics (if you have people buying an entire column) such a 1 number in 1 ticket, 2 numbers in another ticket and 3 numbers in another or any such combination.
• You can give prizes for combination of numbers in the rows i.e. 1 number on a row, 2 on another and 3 on the other.
• While selling tickets, give discounts to people buying the entire column ( 6 tickets). This will encourage people to buy the set which gives you more options to give prizes.
• Giving away absolutely junk prizes in the middle will keep the audience entertained. Eg: After giving away lot of prizes, the person to receive a prize will be looking forward to a goo prize. Then you can suddenly call for a combination which you expect many to have and call all of them to get a prize. You could then give each of them a chocolate or something equally silly!
• If you run out of allocated prizes for the first session on Bingo towards the end, but people are still interested, you can always give out free tickets for the next session as a prize.

Hope these tips help you in organising a good game of Bingo!
Btw, if you don't have the cards to play, you can check this post for a link with which you can print Bingo cards for free.

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Photo of surya jyothika and their daughter Diya

Celebrities never cease to amaze us ordinary folks. It's not only them but their entire family tree which fascinates us. The world went crazy over the wedding pictures of Surya and Jyotika. It was but obvious that the craze continued with their offspring too. So, now we have the photos of surya's and jyothika's daughter taking the online world by storm. Maybe, these were released in competition to the photos of ajith and shalini's daugher , Anoushka ??


Diya celebrated her first birthday with mom and dad and it looked to be a Surya/Jyotika/Sivakumar family affair.

Living on the edge

Well, i don't want to spend an entire life living on the edge, but from time to time, such an experience is entertaining. If you are thrilled of heights or cliff edges, you have to go on this trek. in Cyprus. This one starts from Pissouri village and goes to an isolated beach. You can see more information and "on-the-edge" photos at the Cyprus Blog.

Naming a wireless network

Had been to the doctor today. There were many people already queued up. So, i decided to catch up on some pending work and took my laptop inside the doc's office. I was going to work on some local documents and wasn't interested in the popup which said that there were some wirless networks in range. Out of curiosity, i decided to check out the available networks and guess what the name of the network was....

Photo of ajith, shalini and their baby Anoushka

Look at the people around them. Look at where they are "all" staring. Why are we so obsessed with celebrities ?

Choosing a baby name - Easier said than done

Maho Arnaha Saraswati Pra Chetayati Ketuna Dhiyo Vishwa Vi Rajati.
Asmantsu Tatra Chodyendra Raye Rabhsthavaha TuVidyumna Yashsthavaha

What do the above lines mean to you?
If you are a follower of/believer in the vedas, you would recognise the above as lines from rig veda and would start on trying the understand the meaning conveyed by the lines. If you are a quizzer, you would look at these lines as a probable source of esoteric questions which you as the quiz master would only ever know. But, if you are an expecting parent, then these lines would be a treasure trove of possible unpronounceable names which you would carefully note down in your "Big book of names for my baby"!
This is where Confuso-Kiddo-Name-o-graphy, the art of getting confused by writing down too many baby names, comes into the picture. Recently, my friends had a kid and when we visited them in the hospital, i saw a fat book lying beside the bed. On picking it up and looking inside (i didn't see the cover), i saw lot of strange words and their meanings. I was wondering as to why she was reading Rosenblum's word-list for GRE. Then, on seeing the cover , i realised that it was not the rosenblum book, but a book on Hindu baby names written by "I-shall-unlock-all-the-cages-in-zoos" Menaka Gandhi.
The book was in fact, more confusing that a GRE word list. I guess what Menaka would have done is to copy over the english transliterations of all the holy writings of Hinduism into Excel, then sorted them and then added a random meaning to each one of them. Well, a normal person wouldn't anyway know what a name such as "Caksusa" really meant. He would just go by what is written in the book. It must be the easiest book she must have ever written!
Sometimes, being born an Indian has many disadvantages - for the parents. They have the unfortunate task of naming the child according to zillions of naming conventions. Imagine if the child is Cypriot, they have just few names like Andreas, Christos, Nicos and the feminine forms of them. So, it is pretty easy to choose amongst them. Parents who are a bit religious and want to do things the traditional way would rely upon numerology, the baby's horoscope, vaastu (the location where the baby was delivered and the direction the mom was facing when delivering the baby) , vedic mathematics and few other dozen rules. After doing all the above calculations, if they end up with a restriction that the name should start with the letter "Q" or "X", they immediately turn modern and name the child Pinky, Rocky, Sweety etc.
Americans have it easier still. They can name their children bush, gate, forest or based on practically any word taken from a regular dictionary. Take the case of Tiger Woods. Earl and Kutilda, tiger woods' parents were going for a walk in the remote forests of Vietnam. Kutilda was heavily pregnant at that time. When they went around a corner, Earl suddenly saw what he thought was a tiger and yelled out "There is a tiger in the woods". Kutilda went into a shock and delivered a healthy baby. Considering it a good sign, they named the child "Tiger Woods".
Back to our case - We Indians have to consider a lot of things other than the above mentioned factors in naming a child.

• In today's global village, we have to even consider how americans would react to the name. What if the name was "Manish Bhatt". Americans would be talking about Manish's butt whenever they refer to him. We can't even name our kids with our favourites like Raghunathan Ramakrishnan or Somasundaram Pattabbiraman, as americans find it difficult to pronounce anything more than 2 syllables.
• We also have to think about the possible nicknames that could arise from the name when your kid goes to college. If there are many possible nicknames, rest assured that the one with the most vulgar meaning will be the one with which your child is christened in college.
  
• You also have to attend french classes, german classes and classes of few other popular languages to check if the name you have thought of doesn't have any unintended meanings in these languages.

After all this confusion, many parents give up and name their kid some shit, i mean Samchit!

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