St. Columba’s School, New Delhi conducted it’s annual quizzing extravaganza, the Columban Open Quiz today. It saw massive participation, with top teams from Delhi turning up for the event. I heard that DPS RKP had sent 40 teams to the contest…unbelievable, but yes, there was a sea of teams from there all over the place.
Sadly, our school, DPSVK sent in only two teams. It’s a tradition to keep a name at the Columban; ours were The Encyclopediacs (my team) and Knowalls. My team consisted of Aditya, Tusheed, Pranam, and erm, who else, me. The other team had our pres, with some other members. The other team was hit hard by the fact that a team member hadn’t turned up, and had to be replaced by a substitute.
We were in group B, and the first round was the written prelim of 50 questions. And boy was it tough! It had us Encyclopediax in cold sweat figuring out the answers. After that, the answers were discussed, and we really didn’t expect to get through. To our pleasant surprise, the Encyclopediacs did. That too, we came 4th out of all those teams! Must commend their quick checking, it was very prompt.
10 teams were called for the stage round. It was a low scoring one, because of a very stupid rule. On every direct there was -10 for a wrong answer, or even no answer! To top that off, every team didn’t get a direct turn-by-turn. The team after the last answering team got it. Which is a very unfair system. We did well in the beginning though,and we had the second position. And just at the moment we were about to go through to the next round, the LAST direct question falls on our lap like a hot potato. Naturally, we tried, but with their stupid negative marking system we dropped to third place, and consequently, out. It really hurts when you get out because of a stupid system, and the damned certificates don’t even mention our feat!
Still, this was the first quiz of the year, and a totally new team, it was a good performance. Hope we improve on this one!