Apologies folks, for not putting this post up earlier. I got busy with making the presentation for the Matrix-Ecomm 2007 symposium on Thursday, and then preparing for Matrix’s quiz on Friday; so I didn’t get time to put this up earlier.
Don Bosco Fiesta 2007, a cultural event held at Don Bosco School, Alaknanda (it’s the school right next to my old school, St George’s) held its Mensa Quiz on 23rd August 2007. It’s one of the better quizzes in Delhi, and although it has ‘Mensa’ in it, it has nothing to do with the organization of the same name. And DPS Vasant Kunj won! Would be one of the major trophies for DPS VK Quiz Club this year. Come to think of it, Don Bosco is a really really lucky venue for me – for the venue of the Delhi region finals of the Cadbury Bournvita Quiz 2004, which I won, was also held at Don Bosco. 😉
The Don Bosco Fiesta 2007 Mensa Quiz trophy – note the ‘Best Team’ tag 😉The quiz team had Ankit, Varun and me. As usual [clenches teeth] the driver had gone off to drink tea. Slight delays waiting for him and some gals who were going for other events later, we were off. Reached on time, registered and waited in their auditorium. It’s a whole galaxy compared to DPS VK’s gas chamber (aka mini audi). First they showed us some shitty PowerPoint presentation, with typical drab welcome speeches read out with great gusto. Then they had some dance, which nobody could see because they weren’t doing it on stage. And then some song, by Jal, I think which even a non-Hindi music fan like me could figure that they had messed up.
The announcement for the quiz prelims were made soon. They’ve got a really nice AV hall, where it was held. While the papers were distributed, they took a snap (individually) of all the teams – they do that for putting the pics up on the stage screen when the teams qualify. Don Bosco being an boys’ school, it wasn’t surprising that the chap who was clicking photos suddenly had loads of trouble when it came to taking Carmel Convent’s pic, which meant he spent a lot of time taking it. It was a good question paper, and we had an unaturally high number of flukes hitting right on target. Guess what? We topped in the prelims, while before the answers came out we were scared of not even qualifying! Quite a few good schools came up – including DPS RKP (Ishaan-Tejas-Shraddha), DPS Noida (the Columban Open Quiz 2007 winners) and Shriram (COQ semi-finalists).
Time for refreshments after that. They had Domino’s Pizza, from the store across the road. Bad coordination, because they used to keep only about 10 pizzas and when they finished, used to run across the road to get more. Moreover, after making all the teams salivate over it, they gave us only one fucking slice of a 4″ pizza. Sucks.
Results were announced soon afterwards (before which they showed another shitty ‘presentation’, probably lifted straight from YouTube), and the we qualified, along with the other three schools mentioned earlier, along with the host school and Vasant Valley. They’d put a monitor on each screen, but they were old rusty CRTs with the screen display so much out of foucs that it gave all of us a headache looking at those out-of-focus images. It was a good quiz, very pakau though because it was 15 rounds long. There were some VERY stupid rounds, like a picture round where an image was blocked by a 3×3 grid, with one block being removed at a time when the team asked for it. Dumb, because they deliberately used to take out the pieces which offered no clue at all.
One nice round was their visual round, where a video was shown, but its audio track was stripped off and replaced with a totally unrelated song. Then, the teams were supposed to answer questions on the video AND the song. There was a round on Nobel Prize winners, and we got a wrong question:
In 1901, this person was the first to a win a Nobel Prize for Medicine, for research on diptheria.
And then, they showed a COLOR photo of the person. I protested right then, that a person of 1901 COULDN’T have a color photo (well, he could have, but not of the color quality shown). They stubbornly refused to to change the question, with a stoic ‘quizmaster’s decision is final’.
Final round was a rapid fire round, and just for a good dose of PJ, the quizmaster asked all the fans on stage to be switched off because he ‘wanted the teams to sweat it out in the last round’. It saw some inspired answers from Ankit, and by the end of it, we and DPS RKP were tied for the first place, with DPS Noida third. Went into a tie-breaker, and we WON. Boy, was Ishaan Chugh surprised about losing this one!
So then, that’s a trophy for the DPS VK Quiz Club this year…
It seems that however chum-like Microsucks might act with Linux vendors like Novell these days, they really wanna wanna stab them in the back. Apparently, they’ve ‘spruced’ up their anit-Linux ‘Get The Facts’ (wrong) website recently. So what if they’re tied up to sell Linux themselves, that doesn’t seem to stop them from slinging mud, is it?