Across to bear: Behind the scenes at a cryptic crossword contest

Tensions mount, uncertainty looms, words take on a rather threatening aspect. HT Puzzles' Kabir Firaque writes on being stuck in a grid, with the clock ticking.

Solving cryptic crosswords is a niche art, and this isn’t an easy club to break into. There are few places, even online, where one can turn, for help getting started.

That’s one reason Vivek Singh launched his hobby group, Extra-C, and the club’s marquee event: the Indian Crossword League (IXL) in 2013. (Singh, incidentally, is an IAS officer who heads the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) in Bihar.)

For beginners and lovers of cryptic clues alike, he has roped in freelance enthusiasts to set A Clue A Day (ACAD) contests on crypticsingh.com. There are annual competitions at the inter-school and inter-collegiate level too. When it comes to the marquee events, however, it’s serious business. Only seasoned experts need apply.

I was among 30 puzzle-crackers who qualified for the IXL prelims this year. As the 26 who were able to make it to the event gathered in Bengaluru on December 21, relaxed conversation masked any tension in the room. As it turned out, the written prelims were anything but relaxed.

The prelims carried six contestants into the final: computer scientist Ramki Krishnan (who sets crosswords for Hindustan Times as Witty Cluester) from Chennai, who eventually won for the eighth time in 13 editions; last year’s winner Shashwat Salgaocar, a product manager with Croma in Bengaluru (who sets puzzles for HT as Heisenberg); Aashirwad Viswanathan, a data scientist from Chennai (Riddlecat, to HT puzzlers); investment banker Venkatraghavan Sahasranaman from Mumbai; venture capitalist Sohil Bhagat from Bengaluru; and Jose A, a pre-CAT tutor from Thane.

But let’s rewind a bit.

Computer scientist and IXL 2025 winner Ramki Krishnan, 59.

CLUE HUNTERS

The contest began with online rounds spaced out over 10 Sundays, between September and November. In all, 800 players participated, with the top 30 qualifying for the prelims.

That preliminary round was such a gruelling duel with the mind, even those who did make it through weren’t sure they’d got enough right.

The two backbreaking grids were created by retired finance executive Bhalchandra Pasupathy (aka Ruminant in HT) from Chennai and finance executive S Sreenivasan (aka Get-a-fix) from Pune. When no one could complete them in the allotted time, an additional 15 minutes were granted.

When it had finally ended, I asked Krishnan how he had fared. “Not very well,” he said. He was being modest (or cautious); it turned out he had cracked 44 of the 56 clues. Salgaocar topped the prelims with 47, but even he looked unsure about qualifying when we broke for lunch before the results were announced.

To get a sense of how tough this round was, here is an example: “They are absorbed with eggs, hence can reverse eating meat (9).” One is expected to arrive at the answer by turning “hence can” into SO (hence) and LOO (can); using the indicator “reverse” to flip these backwards to get OOLOS, which should be “eating meat” or taking in GIST (which is a synonym for meat in the sense of substance). This results in OOLOGISTS (people who study eggs, nests and breeding); with the definition given in the original clue — “they are absorbed with eggs” — confirming one has correctly constructed the answer.

Now imagine doing that on the spot, with a clock running out.

GRIDS, GUTS, GLORY

After those wearying rounds and a somewhat subdued lunch break, the six finalists were announced and called onto stage, where they were given two less-challenging grids set by Mumbai-based orthopaedic surgeon Satyen Nabar (aka Bone Setter in HT) and Australia-based setter Bhavan Kumar.

The final, conducted between these six players by Bengaluru tech consultant Ochintya Sharma, mimicked the style of a quiz. One by one, the two blank crossword grids went up on a large screen; clues were either solved or passed from one contestant to the next.

Given how tough the preliminary round was, the win was all the more satisfying, said Krishnan, 59, whose 85 in the final pipped 36-year-old Bhagat’s 75. “In the written prelims, I managed to get five or six answers in a rush in the last two minutes. After that, the onstage grids were like gentle rains after a thunderstorm, but still challenging to solve on the spot.”

League founder Vivek Singh. ‘People still think crosswords are for the English-speaking elite, but they’re not,’ he says.

SQUARED AWAY

Singh, meanwhile, wore a look of quiet satisfaction through it all. It’s been a long journey for him to Extra-C and now even a World Cryptic Crossword Championship (with the final of the first edition held in London this year; three players from England won).

Before he started it all, Singh wrote a book aimed at beginners, and set grids for Swagat, the in-flight magazine of the erstwhile Indian Airlines.

He launched Extra-C and its first two events — IXL and the national inter-school competition CCCC — in 2013, to coincide with the 100th year of the crossword (a puzzle first set by a journalist in New York, in 1913).

“CCCC stands for CBSE Cryptic Crossword Contest, because we collaborated with CBSE in the initial editions. The contest now covers other boards, but we retained the name,” says Kushagra Singh, a management executive in Patna and director of IXL.

At the school level, Vivek Singh says, it still thrills him to introduce students to the idea of a crossword, and to see learners crack simpler clues such as anagrams.

“I want to reach the remotest areas,” he adds. “High-school-level English is really enough for cryptic solving. One just needs to interpret the indicators and know enough synonyms. People still think crosswords are for the English-speaking elite, but they’re not.”