Eureka 2007: Tagore International School

Tagore International School (Vasant Vihar) held their ‘Commerce & Humanities Competition’ Commties 2007 today, 3rd September 2007. Nothing bug, just four events – Aktad (pathetic name, ad-enact event), Impromptu (relatively better name, extempore), Politickle (best name, political caricature event), and Eureka (extremely cliched name, quiz event). Nice place for a computer science student (ahem, me) and a biology stream student (Varun) to go for the quiz. Ended up coming second in the quiz. Maybe commerce guys would have done better. Maybe they wouldn’t.

Day started as usual, setting off late because (other) people hadn’t turned up and stuff. Thankfully, not much of a delay because of anyone drinking tea. School’s close-by to DPS VK anyway. Written prelim had 25 questions to be answered in 20 minutes. The morons conducting it delayed it a lot – first they’d allotted all teams a letter, and then refused to start off until everyone was in the correct room according to their letter AND they were sitting in the correct order. Prelims itself were a joke – we got pretty much everything, and it was pretty general. So pathetic that I don’t even feel like typing out and putting this stuff up here. Left the room early to be the early birds at the refreshment counter, only that they didn’t give us any worms. Came back to endure a HUGE round of extempore and ad-enacts – some were good, most were boring. What was most irritating is that they had team letters for all schools from A to Z, and then A1 and B1 too. Time seemed relative, and even listening to h2g2 on my cell didn’t help.

Finally, time for the quiz finals came. The qualifying teams – us (top scorers in prelims), DPS RKP (not Ishaan, some commerce guys), St Columba’s (commerce folks again), and Amity. I guess we were the only students in an eco-fest. Still we picked up point and were leaders in the beginning in some of the more general rounds. Time soon came for hardcore eco though and we sunk faster than Titanic. A sample from the acronyms round, with our reactions:

1. NSSO – “Huh?”
2. CRR (our direct) – With no idea at ALL, we tried to make something up, “Erm, Calculated Revenue…”; [Quizmaster] “Wrong!”
3. SLR – “Wait! I know this! Single Lens Reflex!”. Actually, it turned out to be some liquidity shit piss.
4. PPP – “Ah, I know this. Pay Per Post. And it’s e-commerce too.” Turned out to be ‘Purchasing Power Parity’.

You get the drift don’t you? Still, we were surprised to see those eco chaps struggling to identify Arun Sarin (of Vodafone) while we got it. Missed a few sitters though. We were leading for a major sections of the quiz, but whenever we had those hardcore eco / politico rounds, our score took a hit. Finally, DPS RKP won in the rapid fire round, with us coming second.

The moral of the story is that me and Varun only went to miss the Monday test. And oh yes, do take a sensible eco person along in the future.