Agnel Talent Fest 2007: DPS VK Overall Winners!

Father Agnel School (Gautam Nagar) held its annual Agnel Talent Fest from 30th August to 1st September 2007. I gave a short post on its Exquizzit quiz earlier here, if you remember. DPS Vasant Kunj won the event, er, technically we were second because Father Agnel was first as they always rig all events to win, but at least for the overall they gracefully declined it.

A mention here of the Code Warriors’ too – for although this was a mainly environment council event, there WERE two tech events. Our web designing team (Vivek & Karthick) came first; and our programming team (Tushar & Avani) came second, behind Father Agnel (their participants themselves admitted the paper had been leaked to them).

Coming to the quiz, the most presitgious event of the ATF. DPS VK sent two teams: first one had me, Varun and Bhavika; the second one had Ankit, Rachit and Srishti. Prelim rounds were good (and I heard, lifted straight from the Mastermind India series) – my team got about 10-11 out of 20, the other team too managed a good score. Both teams qualified – the final eight were Father Agnel (Gautam Nagar), Kalka Public School, DPS RKP (two teams – one with Ishaan-Tejas-Shraddha), DPS VK (both teams), Father Agnel (Noida), and New Era (Prateek’s team). Unlike Joy Bhattacharya, as the invites claimed, we got Rohan Morarka for the finals too. Generally, he just does the prelims (been doing it for the past so many years). This guy, an alumnus of the school, is a bloody brilliant quizzer and the quiz showed. This is what hardcore trivia quizzing is all about – COQ is still manageable and figurable to some point, but Rohan made it pure trivia. At least Joy B puts in figure-out ones.

Anyway, it was pretty fun. The problem was that a) my team gave a pathetic performance, no excuses; b) with Ishaan’s team on our right, and with DPS RKP’s other team & DPS VK’s other team to our left, we were totally starved of passes. Whatever we DID know was picked off by Ishaan / the other RKP (or VK) teams; whatever we didn’t know and did pass on to us was stuff that none of the teams knew. Highly frustrating. Plus, it has five AV rounds, which were practically tailor-made for IC, with him picking up almost each and every question in those rounds.

The quiz had to be cut short because of time constraints, and Ankit-Rach-Srishti team were tied at the third place with Prateek’s team. With nobody budging from their position even after tie-breakers, they settled for the joint position. Created a bit of a problem during the prize distribution.

Then again, Rach seems to have picked up a dislike for Ishaan. When one member from each team was asked to come up in the beginning to light the lamp; Rach asks me “Can I set Ishaan on fire instead?”, with Ishaan standing right next to me. IC just gave his Buddha smile. The other occasion was when Rach shouted at IC to shut up. Of course, IC was stunned to hear this from someone whom he didn’t even know. Boy did Rach goof up there! ATF turned out to be pretty fun event; and this probably was Ishaan’s best performance ever. Congrats to him for that!