Lately—and by lately I mean the kind of lately that spreads
through the internet like spilled blood across a white tile floor, the kind you
can’t un-see no matter how hard you squeeze your eyes shut—a viral controversy
has erupted over the West Kalimantan provincial round of the MPR RI Smart Quiz
Competition. You probably know the kind of event I mean. Folding tables.
Nervous kids in neat uniforms. Fluorescent lights humming that one note they
always hum, the note that sounds like a question nobody wants to answer. Adults
in cheap blazers sitting behind a long table with the important, slightly
constipated expressions of people who have been given a small amount of power
and fully intend to use it.
Team C2 from SMA Negeri 1 Pontianak buzzed in quickly on a
question regarding the selection process for the Audit Board of Indonesia—the
BPK, if you’re keeping score at home, and trust me, somebody always is.
Their answer was correct. Actually, genuinely, textbook
correct. The kind of correct that should have made everyone nod and smile and
write down the ten points and move along. But that isn’t what happened. What
happened instead was something older and uglier than a simple scoring dispute,
something that has been happening in rooms like that one since the very first
time a person with a clipboard decided they were the one who got to say what
was real and what wasn’t.
The judges ruled it wrong.
Too fast, they said. Too unclear. As if correctness
were a flavor that could be ruined by eating it too quickly. As if the truth of
a thing depended not on its substance but on whether the person in charge
happened to be listening at the right second. They didn’t just deny the team
its ten points, either. No, no—they went ahead and docked them five.
Punished them for being right. There’s a word for that. Several words,
actually, most of them short and not suitable for polite company.
Then—and here’s where it gets good, or bad, depending on
which side of the buzzer you’re on—the exact same question was put to Team B
from SMA Negeri 1 Sambas. Team B gave what every person watching with
functioning ears could plainly hear was the same answer, delivered in the same
basic way. The judges accepted it without a flicker of hesitation. Ten-point
bonus. Big smiles all around.
The starkly different treatment was captured live on the
competition’s YouTube broadcast, and I want you to sit with that for a moment,
because it matters. A camera saw it. The camera doesn’t care who’s wearing the
blazer. The camera just watches, patient and indifferent as God, recording
everything whether you like it or not.
“Excuse me, judges,” said a member of Team C2—and I admire
this kid, I genuinely do, with the bone-deep admiration of anyone who has ever
sat across from a person with a clipboard and known, known in their marrow,
that they were right and the person with the clipboard was wrong. “We answered
it exactly the same way as Team B. It’s identical.”
Just that. Clean, simple, unarguable. The kind of sentence
that has nowhere to hide.
Clips of those students standing up and pushing back against
the host and the panel spread like wildfire online, and the social media
outrage machine—which is usually good for nothing except making everyone feel
worse about being alive—actually did something useful for once. It got loud
enough that the Secretary-General of the MPR RI had to issue a statement
promising a comprehensive review of the scoring system and the overall
management of the competition. Leadership, facing the particular terror of
being seen clearly, went so far as to annul the West Kalimantan results
entirely and ordered the finals to be redone.
Small justice. Better than nothing. But the thing is—and
this is the thing, the real thing, the thing I keep coming back to—the thing is
that this wasn’t really about one quiz in one province on one afternoon. It
never is. It’s about something much older. It’s about what happens when you
take the simple human joy of a question and an answer and you put a judge
in between them.
---
Because this fast-paced quiz format—the buzzer, the lectern,
the ticking clock, the terrible electric anticipation of being first—actually
originated in military barracks during the mid-20th century, when the world was
still wading through rubble and trying to remember what normal felt like.
Picture it: 1944, somewhere cold and functional and smelling of canvas and gun
oil and the particular sweat of men who haven’t slept properly in months. A
Canadian named Don Reid, a man with a passion for word games the way some men
have a passion for whiskey or religion or the smell of fresh lumber, created a
simple quiz to entertain soldiers under the United Service Organizations.
Amid the roar of gunfire—real gunfire, the kind that ends
things permanently—the game became a mental oasis. A place where the enemy was
just a question, where victory was just knowing the right answer, where for
five minutes you weren’t a body that could be destroyed but a mind that
was working, firing, alive. They leaned over their little tables the same way
those kids in Pontianak leaned over theirs, fingers hovering over buzzers,
hearts doing that tight quick flutter that means I know this, I know this,
please let me be fast enough.
The format reached radio in the mid-1940s, when Philadelphia
station WFIL began airing Campus Quiz out of the Manor Theater, with
prizes like jukeboxes and all the electric optimism of a country that had just
won a war and hadn’t yet figured out what to do with all that energy. By 1948,
a paper mill in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, was sponsoring Delco Hi-Q,
an inter-school competition that—and this is the part that always gets me, the
part that feels like it means something even if I can’t quite say what—continues
to this day. The oldest continuously running academic quiz in the United
States. Older than most of us. Still going. Still asking questions, still
waiting for the fastest hand.
On October 10, 1953, College Quiz Bowl premiered on
NBC Radio, Northwestern against Columbia, Northwestern winning, four kids on
each side and a moderator and a buzzer system and the unspoken rule that
buzzing in early meant losing points. Ten-point questions. Penalty for
impatience.
By January 4, 1959, it was on television—CBS first, then NBC—and
Allen Ludden and Robert Earle were hosting it, and millions of American
families were watching it every weekend, and sharp young minds were being
elevated to something like athletic celebrity, and corporations were sponsoring
the whole gorgeous circus, because somebody had figured out the eternal
American equation: intelligence plus competition plus a camera equals money.
---
Indonesia got the fever in the early 1960s, just as state
television was flickering to life and becoming the nation’s one eye open on the
wider world. The woman who brought it home was Ani Sumadi, who would eventually
be remembered as Indonesia’s Queen of Quizzes, which is the kind of title that
sounds modest but isn’t. Queens don’t ask permission.
She’d worked abroad. She’d watched the Western quiz shows
with the eye of someone who understands that a format is really just a delivery
system for something more primal—the thrill of the question, the agony of not
knowing, the electric relief of the correct answer spoken into a microphone in
front of everyone. She tailored it to fit Indonesian culture, the way a good
tailor takes a pattern and makes it belong to the body it’s meant for. Her
first creation was Silent Quiz, hosted by a comedian named Ratmi B29.
Then came Cerdas Cermat and Cepat Tepat.
During TVRI’s golden era, these shows were what you watched
if you had a television, which meant they were what the whole country watched.
Elementary school students on one, junior high and high schoolers on the other,
contestants from across the archipelago—all of them sitting up straight behind
wooden lecterns in neat uniforms, while academic jurors in stiff safari suits
looked on with the grave expressions of men guarding something important.
Buzzers locked and loaded.
Remote villagers crowded around communal televisions in town
halls. Urban families gathered in living rooms. The questions covered
Pancasila, the 1945 Constitution, the Broad Guidelines of State Policy.
Memorize this. Know this. Be ready to be fast enough.
But here’s the thing about power, the thing it can never
resist: when it finds a format that works, it uses it. Behind the curtain,
behind the cheerful buzzers and the neatly uniformed children and the wholesome
nationalistic spirit of it all, something else was running.
The New Order government—Soeharto’s government, the one that
would last thirty-two years and leave marks that haven’t healed—understood
something about the quiz format that nobody said out loud. The format, in its
pure mechanical beauty, enforces obedience. There is one right answer.
The authority figure tells you whether you said it correctly. There is no room
to say well, but, actually, when you consider— because the buzzer doesn’t
wait and the judge doesn’t want to hear it and the clock is always running. The
rigid quiz format—focused entirely on rote memorization and single correct
answers—gradually shaped, as Dhianita Kusuma Pertiwi wrote later, a culture of
obedience and uniformity. No critical debate. Just: do you know what the state
has decided you should know? Yes or no. Right or wrong. Points added, points
deducted.
The BP-7—the state body for implementing Pancasila
awareness, a name which sounds almost parody-absurd until you remember that it
was completely real and completely serious—ran quiz competitions called Lomba
Cerdas Tangkas P4 and Lomba Cerdas Cermat P4 from 1978 to 1998.
Twenty years. A generation of children learning that the right answer was
whatever the man in the safari suit said it was.
Then there was Kelompencapir—an acronym for Groups of
Listeners, Readers, and Viewers—a quiz competition for farmers and fishermen.
Same format, different audience, same deeper purpose. Questions about
state-approved farming practices. Questions about fertilizer. Aired during
prime time. Often attended by President Soeharto himself, sitting there with
his particular smile, the smile of a man who has learned that the most
effective propaganda looks exactly like a celebration.
The show portrayed rural villages as prosperous and
technologically savvy. Under Information Minister Harmoko, it became a central
cog in the political communication machine, institutionalizing a development
ideology, silencing the awkward questions about agricultural failures the way
you silence a buzzer—just don’t let the hand reach it in time, and then take
away five points for trying.
---
And yet—because there is always an and yet in stories
like this, because the human desire to know things and test things and beat
the clock is apparently unkillable—even in the darkest corners of the
format, something ridiculous and wonderful and very human kept breaking
through.
In late 1985, the Cerdas Cermat and Cepat Tepat
broadcasts on TVRI were being exploited by gambling syndicates in Pontianak,
West Kalimantan. A boom in illegal lottery betting. Total turnover: hundreds of
millions of rupiah, managed by an organized network of roughly a hundred
low-level bookies, fifty mid-tier bookies, and five major kingpins who probably
watched those wholesome quiz shows with the focused attention of Wall Street
traders watching a stock ticker.
The method was beautiful in its absurdity: you took the
scores of the participating quiz teams, summed the digits in ways that would
take a page to explain, and the result gave you a number between 00 and 99.
That was your lottery number. Winners could collect up to sixty times their
bet.
The police crackdown became so snarled that the local chief
was hauled into a pretrial hearing for arresting two suspected female bookies
without proper procedure. The women were released for lack of evidence.
“They didn’t want to testify,” said the Pontianak Police
Chief, Lt. Col. Guntur Sumastopo, “because the bookies were their close
friends.”
Of course they were. In a country where a quiz format
had been turned into an instrument of state control, the people found a way to
turn it back into something ungovernable, something slipping through official
fingers like water. The state pointed its cameras at children reciting the
principles of Pancasila, and somebody in Pontianak looked at the score counter
and saw a different kind of possibility entirely. Operators tried to bribe TVRI
staff in Jakarta to leak the scores in advance, though their offers were flatly
rejected.
The machine, it turned out, could not be completely
controlled. It never can.
---
The New Order fell in 1998, which is a polite way of saying
it collapsed under the weight of everything it had hidden, the way old houses
eventually collapse under the weight of all the things that have been piling up
in the attic for decades. RCTI had already gone on air in 1989—the first
private TV station, which seems like a small thing until you realize it meant
that for the first time viewers had options, which is maybe the most
politically destabilizing word in any language.
The format evolved. Commercial quiz shows brought in
celebrities and live phone interactions and high-energy music and flashy studio
lighting. Helmy Yahya—who had himself been a champion on Cepat Tepat
back in the late ‘70s, a kid who once sat behind one of those lecterns with his
finger near the buzzer—became a central figure in building the new landscape,
working alongside Ani Sumadi on shows with names like Tak Tik Boom and Sang
Juara. His brother Tantowi hosted Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on
RCTI in the 2000s. Even the old Queen of Quizzes had descendants she might not
have fully recognized, but you could see the family resemblance if you
squinted.
Family 100. Kuis Dangdut. Olimpiade Indonesia Cerdas.
The names change. The lights get brighter. The music gets louder. But somewhere
underneath all of it, underneath the celebrity guests and the audience polling
and the telephone interactions, there is still a question being asked, and
still a hand reaching for a buzzer, and still the terrible human need to be
right, to be recognized as right, to have someone with authority look you in
the eye and say: yes. Correct. Ten points.
---
Which brings us back to Team C2. Back to that fluorescent
room in West Kalimantan. Back to those kids in their neat uniforms who gave the
right answer and were told it was wrong, and then watched as the same answer
was given by someone else and declared correct, and then—this is the part that
matters, this is the part that separates this story from ten thousand other
stories of petty injustice that nobody ever hears about—stood up and said so.
“It’s identical,” said the student. Just that. Clean as a
buzzer sound.
The clips spread. The Secretary-General promised a review.
The results were annulled. The finals will be redone.
It isn’t a perfect ending. Real life rarely is. But
somewhere, I imagine, Ani Sumadi—who once told producers of academic
competitions don’t make silly quizzes—might have allowed herself a
small, satisfied nod.
The format survived dictators and gamblers and thirty-two
years of single correct answers enforced from above. It survived the fall of a
government and the arrival of celebrity guests and the migration from wooden
lecterns to television studios bright as operating theaters.
It’ll survive this, too.
The buzzer is still there. The question is still there.
And somewhere, right now, a kid with their finger hovering
is thinking: I know this. I know this.
Let me be fast enough.
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