prelude  WISH YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2009 and I welcome you all to this episode of THE COLOSSEUM that heralds the New Year. The column has completed ten years in October, 2008 under my pen. It has also completed three years of its existence online on The Assam Tribune website. To commemorate one decade of this column, The Colosseum Quiz Fest, 2008 was held in a grand way and now this quiz show is a yearly event. The column has come a long way and I would like to thank all the well wishers for their support all throughout. I am specially thankful to all those who have been regularly contributing to make the column a successful one. When questions need to be from a specific area (Culture), it requires lots of patience and labour. This cultural quiz column is perhaps the only one of its kind in entire India, and now we have a good number of contributors with quality matching the standard of this column. There is no dearth of quizzing talents in this part of the country and this is evident from the increasing number of contributors, to this column over the past ten years, specially in the year 2008. The new entrants who have made a mark in this column are: Sonmani Das, Deepjyoti Deka, Himjyoti Talukdar, Saroj Kumar Deka, Pranjal Kishore Sharma, Sadique Hussain Laskar, Saurav Sarkar, Kuldeep Dutta and the list goes on. Among the quiz contributors of this column, my favourites are: Bhagyajeet Bhuyan, Prasenjit ‘Piklu’ Dutta, Jayanta Kumar Nath and Maharnav Gogoi, etc. Though THE COLOSSEUM has been receiving contributions from different states of India such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Haryana, Delhi, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh , I must admit that it is the quizzards from this Northeastern state who are basically responsible for the success of this column. In Assam, we have contributors from almost all the districts of the Brahmaputra valley. But, we get maximum contributions from Nalbari district, followed by Barpeta, Kamrup, Darrang, Sonitpur, Sivasagar, Bongaigaon, Dhubri, Lakhimpur and Nagaon districts. In the last couple of years; we have been privileged to receive contributions from a few European countries and American states. After nurturing the column for the last one decade, I felt it necessary that new entrants to the quizzing fraternity should be encouraged more and, therefore, there has always been an effort to publish more questions from the contributors rather than I publishing my own questions most of the time. For all the contributors of this column, it is important to note that this is a cultural quiz column, and my definition of culture includes areas like music, dance, fashion, designing, movies, art, sculpture, books, literature, a little bit of history, the culture of different Northeastern tribes and culture in different parts of the world. All the contributors of the column are requested to mail his/ her photo for our record book. This is required when we are in the process of considering the names for the Best of THE COLOSSEUM. While publishing the names of the best contributors of the column today, I would like to request the rest, whose names do not appear in the list, not to lose heart and try their best in 2009. The standard of all the regular contributors was equally good. And it is for your information that the best contributors in each sub-section of the column are selected on the basis of the most number of published questions by a single contributor. Therefore, for that reason, in most years, the same winners bag the prizes. These prizes will be awarded during The Colosseum Quiz Fest, 2009 in recognition of their tireless efforts to make this column successful. Congrats to all of you …. and HERE I GO WITH THE RESULTS ….. but, with the celebrations on for the New Year and the Magh Bihu, keep continuing the good work by mailing your questions with answers to me at: only4_pol@yahoo.co.uk or post them at: THE COLOSSEUM, Mosaic, Friday Supplement, The Assam Tribune, Guwahati-781003.

best of the colosseum 2008  Jayanta Kumar Nath, Tezpur

best of side screen  First: Himjyoti Talukdar, Ashram, New Delhi. Second: Manjil P. Saikia, Darrang College, Tezpur. Third: Prosenjit ‘Piklu’ Dutta, Tezpur.

best of harmonisers  First: Jayanta Kumar Nath, Tezpur. Second: Maharnav Gogoi, Assam Engineering College. Md. Sadique Hussain Laskar, Cyber City, Pune. Third: Prosenjit ‘Piklu’ Dutta, Tezpur.

best of unities  First: Dipankar Koushik, Guwahati. Second: Prosenjit ‘Piklu’ Dutta, Tezpur. Third: Sonmani Das, Nalbari.

best of do-re-me  First: Saroj Kr. Deka, Gauhati University. Second: Md. Sadique Hussain Laskar, Cyber City, Pune. Third: Amiya Kumar Baruah, Phulaguri, Nagaon.

best of crescendo  First: Jayanta Kumar Nath, Tezpur. Second: Bhagyajeet Bhuyan, DD News, New Delhi. Third: Amiya Kumar Baruah, Phulaguri, Nagaon.