Smart kids quizzed on I-Day

New Delhi: East and West, Delhi is the best.

Well, that was the outcome of the first-ever live quiz conducted on national television via satellite by CNN-IBN on Independence Day.

The programme, Smart Kid Independence Quiz, saw participation by school teams from across the country and at the end of the four zonal rounds, four teams from each zone – North, South, East and West – made it to the final.

While Kendriya Vidyalaya Andrewj Ganj, New Delhi, - represented by Nalin and youngest participant Surya – qualified for the final from the North Zone, the East Zone was represented by Krishna Niketan, Patna, the only girls team to take part in the contest. The Patna team was represented by Shweta Rani and Neha Raj.

An all-boys team from DAV Boys' Higher Secondary School, Gopalpuram, Chennai, represented by Rahul and Surya – was the third participant while Don Bosco School, Matunga, Mumbai – represented by Animesh and Rounak – was the fourth team, which made it to the final from West zone.

The final featured questions on the national flag. The final contest began with an interesting question: When was the Indian flag first hoisted at the Red Fort? Surya from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Andrewj Ganj, came up with the cracker of an answer to bag the first score. And the answer was: August 16, 1947. It was Saturday and the flag was hoisted at exactly 8.30 am.

And from 1948 onwards, the regular flag hoisting ceremony at Red Fort became a permanent ritual of the Independence Day.

Why do we hoist the national flag at Red Fort on August 15? The answer: because it was Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's dream to hoist the flag there.

History has it that during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, a band of people had gone to Red Fort and had a flag hoisted there and accorded a gun salute to Bahadur Shah Zafar.

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The third question was: When and where in independent India was the first national flag hoisted? It was a puzzle nobody could quite get right. And the answer is on the central dome of the Council House on August 15, 1947.

And then, when and where did the first public hoisting of the national flag take place in Independent India? That was the final question of the final round and it caught all the teams unawares. And the answer is: The first public hoisting of the national flag took place on August 15, 1947 at Princess Park near India Gate and it was performed by Jawaharlal Nehru.

At the end of the final round, Kendriya Vidyalaya, Andrewj Ganj, New Delhi, came first followed closely by Don Bosco School, Matunga, Mumbai. The quiz was conducted by senior CNN-IBN journalist Vidya Shankar Aiyar.