Personal Reflections – Page 167

MINET 2006

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…

DPSVK Quiz Club Intra 2006 – The Finals

On Thursday, 24th August 2006, the DPSVK Quiz Club Intra 2006 came to an end. The finals were conducted on that day, and I’m somewhat happy with the whole thing.

The day started off badly, with our intra in the morning being cancelled for some stupid house meeting (even after we’d taken permission), in which nothing was done. We protested, saying that the Code Warriors were given one whole day to conduct their intra. The Vice Principal then relented and gave us time during the break and one period.

There was another fiasco again at the later scheduled time, when she told us to move off, as our meeting was clashing with another during the same time. So we, very bravely, decided to leave the environs of the building and go out to cruel harsh outdoors, and conducted our intra on the lawns. There were some pretty amused gardeners (and I bet the flowerpots would’ve felt the same) to see the students sweating it out (literally…) and try to solve the paper made by ME. 42 questions (anyone gets the significance?) to be attempted in about 20 minutes, but then I extended the time to 30 minutes seeing that nobody was getting anything, but mainly because I didn’t want to present my beautiful face to the teacher in the middle of a period only to get pulled up for being not in class.

Cheating galore, hardly anyone was trying on their own. There were some really sincere students, and they did well. At the end of the day, the toppers in the test turned out to be guys who already go for quizzes from our school (like, my pal Prannoy Sablok). There are some promising new members too, whom I want to see flourishing next year.

Point is, I don’t think the guys will be seeing much action this year, as the quizzing season is almost over, and sure they’ll be disappointed with that. But the main point is majority of current members are in class 12th and they’ll be leaving next year; we seriously need trained replacements. Also the new members will have to look at recruiting others, especially those from junior sections who need to start training. Quizzing is not as if you just land up one day at the venue and answer questions – it takes time to learn the ropes, and to get the knack of cracking questions.

Looking forward to a good year next year, when I want to see the current crop to be trained enough to support me (replace me?). You can read about the 2006 Intra here, about the members here, and for Q & A and related files, you can visit my file server here.