MINET 2006 was conducted at the Mother’s International School on the 1st and 2nd September 2006. And we tanked, big time. MINET is known to be one of the best computer fests, and it stood up to that reputation. I went there for the quiz and the crossword, so I’m going to comment more on that, but the event itself was good. Best thing – it seemed to be totally done by the students of MIS, with minimum intervention from school management (which is anyway a good thing).
The quiz and the crossword prelims were conducted on the 1st. First we had the quiz, the first event in the morning. The written prelims had 3 team members. My team had me, Prannoy Sablok and Gaurav Trivedi, all top-level Code Warriors. The questions were really good, and we sailed through. Immediately afterwards was the crossword prelim, which had me and Prannoy on team (only two members for this one). The crossword was far more cryptic (which was obvious) but went through on this one too. The prelim results are given at the beginning of this post.
In a way, I’d expected this, since I’d been preparing for it, and wasn’t much surprised. The finals were next day, 2nd September, and I prepared for this one too. Little did I forsee what would happen on that day…
I turned up at the venue to register for the day on time. The crossword finals were to be conducted first and my partner hadn’t turned up, which got me really irritated. A few frantic calls to my partner later, which really saw me getting pretty hyper with a major contest to go, the crossword finalists were called in. Me – screaming on my cell asking the second guy to hurry up. Reluctantly, and one member down, I started off. I got the first direct, which was good. But to be a member down while figuring out cryptic clues is not a very easy task. My partner finally showed up in round 4, in a final which had a total of 5 rounds, and by then it was pretty late to recover anything. We ended up coming fourth in the event. Along with me having a boiling temper. Exun took top spot in this event.
Since the crossword finals had finished early, the organizers wanted to start off the quiz finals then itself. Again, the third member hadn’t shown up for the event, and said he’d be unable to do so until some more time. So I fought with the organizers to keep the event on schedule, and hoping the guy would turn up.
He didn’t, and it was time for the event to finally start. All my screaming on the cellphone and bombarding Gaurav with SMSs gone waste, we went on-stage for a really shameful fifth position in the quiz finals. The standard of the questions were pretty high, and with a disfunctional, angry and irritated Code Warrior (me); a stunned Code Warrior (Prannoy); and an absent Code Warrior (Gaurav), we really stood no chance. Exun, like a well-oiled machine, took the top two positions, with the rest of the teams far behind.
Exun won the overall trophy at MINET 2006. It was a bad outing for the Code Warriors – we got only two positions – 2nd in digital imaging (Anshul) and 3rd in gaming (Abhimanyu). Overall I guess we finished second or third, but for CW, nothing less than winning is an option. And our performance was poor.
Much of this can be attributed to lack of enthusiasm among the quiz team (does that include me?). We need to get a proper training structure in place so that we are prepared for quizzes. I would have commented more on this, but for now, I’d leave it here. I will wait until the phase test I conduct for Quiz Club members in October, after which our position would be clearer.
Hope we win next time…