India – ankurb

I found out that Anoushka Shankar was performing in Delhi yesterday quite fortuitously, during a conversation with Ishan on Friday. I hastily formed plans with a couple of friends to attend the gig, including Ishan. I’ve been a fan of Anoushka Shankar’s sister Norah Jones for a long time, but I hadn’t paid much attention to Shankar herself till now.

The venue was Talkatora Stadium, which brought back memories of going there so many years during high school for HT’s InQuizitive Quiz. Shankar’s gig was breathtaking. It was a medley of her centerpiece sitar play, with shehnai, tabla, piano, cello, drums / hang drums. The set list primarily drew upon her 2013 album Traces of You, with a song called In Jyoti’s Name dedicated to the 2012 Delhi gangrape victim. Something that clearly touched Anoushka Shankar, because she got quite choked up when introducing the premise of the song. An emotional moment for the audience.

My favourite track out of the entire show was her opening track (also, the opening track for the same album) called The Sun Won’t Set, featuring Norah Jones.

This weekend, I was at Exun 2013, one of Delhi’s biggest computer technology symposiums (along with Code Wars). Having been a participant at the event for many, many years it felt nice to be back as a judge at Exun and meet so many bright kids into technology.

I signed on for Exun when DPS RK Puram’s HoD, Mr Mukesh Kumar, got in touch with me a couple of weeks ago about conducting the junior quiz, senior quiz, and crossword. I expected nothing short of the best teams at this event, hence why I knew I needed to put in extra effort to ensure the tradition of Exun’s event standards were maintained.

It's worth noting that *42* teams participating in the Exun Junior Quiz prelims — It’s worth noting that *42* teams participating in the Exun Junior Quiz prelims

It was an amazing – and tiring – experience to conduct the three events, but I loved every minute of it. Raghav Khullar helped me build the question archive for all events, and Exun members / Mukesh sir helped me with organisational logistics at every stage. And with that, I present the archives for Exun 2013:

Junior Quiz: Prelims (PDF, ~370 KB); Finals (PDF, ~3.3 MB)
Crossword: Prelims (opens in a new window); Finals (opens in a new window) n.b. I’m aware of an error in the one question in the finals, where the answer should have been “SILKROAD” and not “SILKROUTE”
Senior Quiz: Prelims (PDF, ~680 KB); Finals (ZIP, ~6.7 MB) n.b. I had to use PPTX for the finals presentation decks because it contains embedded media.

Hope the teams enjoyed the quizzes and the crossword. Feedback appreciated! 🙂