Indian-Americans featured as a whole category on Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions quarter-final

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In the Nov. 10 round of Jeopardy! the popular quiz show, Indian-Americans featured in a big way. The Double Jeopardy round had five questions in the “Indian Americans” category with rewards ranging from $400 to $2,000, and one of them was a Daily Double, for which the contestant could wager the reward amount.

Jeopardy, which is hosted by Alex Trebek, gets 25 million viewers, according to Hollywood Reporter.

Pranjal Vachaspati, a PhD student of computational phylogenetics that uses software for studies in biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the Jeopardy champions, but he was not on the quarter-final with Indian-American category.

In the first quarter-final round on Nov. 6, he came in second but because of his overall winning of $16,401 in the game, he became eligible to participate in the semi-final rounds starting Nov. 13.

Originally from Shaker Heights, Ohio, 24-year-old Vachaspati had walked away with $137,088 during a six-day winning streak last year.

Earlier in November, there were two Indian-Americans in the same show. But Anand Kandaswamy, a three-day winner with $57,001, and Rahul Jain lost on the Nov. 1 show.

Sharath Narayan won the Teen Jeopardy with a prize of $100,000 last year. He was a high school sophomore last year.

In the College Jeopardy competition in February, Viraj Mehta came in third, winning the $25,000 prize.

Here are the Jeopardy clues in the Indian-Americans category. How many can you get right?

1. Here’s a “Project”: name this sitcom star, with over 8 million Twitter followers, who wrote “Why Not Me?” in 2015
2. A Forbes headline: “One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How” his academy “Is Reinventing Education”
3. Double Jeopardy: This Sunday morning CNN host was only 28 when he was appointed as the managing editor of foreign affairs
4. The daughter of Indian & Jamaican immigrants, she was elected to replace Barbara Boxer in the Senate in 2016
5. In addition to live news coverage of the first operation of the Iraq War, he performed five brain surgeries in the desert
6. Bonus question on the Jeopardy site for fans, but not on the show: “Dangerously Delicious” & “Buried Alive” are comedy specials from this “Master of None” actor

Contestants reply to the clues in the form of a question on the game. Here were the answers and questions on the show:

1. Who is Mindy Kaling? (She is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She stars as Dr. Mindy Kuhel Lahiri in “The Mindy Project,” a comedy series that aired Fox from 2012 to 201t when it moved to Hulu.)

2.Who is Salman Khan? (Founder of the online institution Khan Academy. His father, Fakhrul Amin Khan, is from Bangladesh and his mother, Masuda Khan, is from India.)

3. Who is Fareed Zakaria? (He is the host of CNN’s flagship foreign affairs show, “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a Washington Post columnist, a contributing editor for The Atlantic.)
4. Who is Kamala Harris? (Last year the Democrat became the first person of Indian descent to be elected to the Senate. Earlier, she was California’s attorney general.)
5. Who is Sanjay Gupta? (A neurosurgeon by training, he is CNN’s chief medical correspondent who has won several Emmy awards. While reporting on Iraq War, he performed life-saving brain surgeries in field hospitals.)
6. Who is Aziz Ansari? (A stand-up comedian who has acted in several movies and TV show, he co-created, wrote and directed Master of None, where he also plays the role of an actor, Dev Shah. The comedy is on Netflix).