Quizzing – Page 54

I must say, when I’d sent in the registration form for this I didn’t expect the quiz to be as good. I went for the Carmel Convent Quiz 2007 today, with Varun and Rachit as the other two members of my team. The other team had Ankit, Bhavika, and Varun (Jain). In a total repeat of the stuff that happened on the day of the St Xavier’s competition, we were waiting for the bus driver to turn up in the bus outside. Apparently, he’d gone to [drumroll please] drink tea. And guess what, once again, the driver showed up but then fucking guard had gone to drink tea. Oh well, we set off around 8.42am, with the registration time ending at 8.45am. We were in amazing luck, because it just happened that the road outside DPS VK was closed, so we took a long detour to Delhi Cantt to reach Carmel Convent at 9.20am. By that time, the written prelims had already started off.

It was the type of prelim where the quizmaster calls out the questions and you write it on a blank sheet. By the time we reached, 10 out of 30 questions had already been called out. Hell, it was a whole lotta confusion, be we managed to get some answers in. He did repeat the questions, but it was done so quickly that we hardly caught any of those. In such a swell mood after having submitted a paper whose answers we got hardly got time to think over, I bumped into smug looking Ishaan, Bharat and Tejas from DPS RKP. I hate that arrogant grin they always have on their faces. Sweet revenge was soon at hand when the answers were called out and we’d got quite a few correct. And guess what? We made it through being among the top 3 teams in the prelim. Sheesh, you people should have been there to see the meek face with which Ishaan asked me how many we’d got correct. We got team 7, and thanks to some stupid girl from the host school all the teams were made to sit in a jumbled up order, that came back to haunt the team later. In hindsight, team number 7 (ours) didn’t turn out to be that lucky, because we were flanked by St Columba’s teams on one side and DPS RKP (some younglings, not the Snooty Trio) on the other. Which meant so many passes that we knew were snatched away like lollipop from a baby by the teams by our side, whichever way they came from.

Anyway, the quiz was pretty good. Eight rounds in all, and with quite good questions. There were two specialisation rounds – one on Tintin (me and Varun knew that – plus I’m a BIG Tintin fan!), and the other on Rahul Dravid (Rach and Varun did well in that). They had the old Direct & Passing system, not Infinite Bounce. The quizmaster was some chap I didn’t know, but apparently he worked for some TV channel too. That’s because he kept on getting calls in the middle of the quiz, and he’d scamper off stage to answer it (with his collar mike on, but we couldn’t make out the stuff he was saying). He came back after one of those conversations, apologized and said that he needed to give an interview to the TV channel because something major world event had happened. Naturally we asked him what it was and waited with bated breath. My mind was racing through all kinds of stuff – had they discovered some previously unknown work of Douglas Adams; or maybe Lindsay Lohan had decided to release her new album sooner, or…well it was cut short. He said that the Indo-US nuclear pact had gone through.

The competition among the top teams was pretty tough, with all of us charging in for a photo finish. It was all so intense, sometimes we would fall back and then recover to find ourselves in the top three. In the end though, St Columba’s won…and we lost…by 1.5 points. Sigh.

Ah sigh, but then I really don’t expect much from the QC this year. I myself am so much more into Code Warriors activity, that I haven’t even logged into FunTrivia for seven months now (until yesterday). And then, my members are so new that this is their first or second quiz. It was nice though to see a good performance from both Rach and Varun, they nailed quite a few questions.

The Carmel Convent Quiz 2007 was fun overall. I got some appreciation for the funniest answer. The question asked was ‘A man named Father Coelho played an important role in Rahul Dravid’s life. Who was he?’. All teams were clueless about this one, making wild guesses. I said that Father Coelho was the chap who gave Rahul Dravid a lift to the stadium on his first match day. Got a nice round of applause from the teams on stage too. 😀 The answer though was that he was the guy who convinced Dravid’s parents that Rahul could manage both cricket and academics. Sigh. Wish all quizzers came with a packaged Father Coelho-type figure to calm down parents, just like a fairy godmother. There were other scenes too, when Rach slapped himself on stage, and tried to strangle Varun. Must keep in mind though that Rach needs to work on his high five though – because his fives made my hand smart for a long time. Shoulda also seen the way Rach attacked the Domino’s pizza that was for refreshment.

Anyway, I guess all the QC members found the trip a learning experience. We got our prize in seeing DPS RKP’s trio squatting on the ground dejected throughout the quiz. Man, the look on their faces! Only one mystery remains now – last year, Carmel Convent celebrated 25 years of their school, and this year, it was their ‘Golden Jubilee’! Pass me the Ageing Potion, will ya?

Had this competition today. It was at St Xavier’s School, New Delhi and it was Interface 2007. It was nothing major at all, all Code Warriors knew that, just that…my hands were itching to scribble at a competitive quiz again.

Our first event for this year then, started on a bad note. Very promising and new team, new people in with loads of talent, and this was the perfect opportunity to test them out. It was pretty much at the opposite corner of Delhi, so we wanted to start off at 8 am. It’s just that we we found out that the bus we’d been allotted was supposed to go for some other competition – a fancy dress competition at Carmel Convent for primary kids. To top that off, our transport incharge was on leave, so it took a good 20 minutes before someone sorted the mess out and allotted us a new bus. That didn’t end it though – the guard at the gate had gone of somewhere for tea or whadev, and we were stranded for 15 more minutes while people tried to track him down. Anyway, it was so far off that it took us an hour to reach that area, and even then, we couldn’t find the school. We were frantically trying to look it up on Google Maps, which doesn’t have very close up info on roads; trying to figure out a disfigured MapMyIndia.com printout; and trying to decipher what out teacher escort (who’d reached the place directly) was saying about which road to take to reach there. Me and one of the Code Warriors were then reduced to running around on roads with the bus following us, trying to find out where the bloody school was. I’ve noticed this thing though – in Delhi, if you ask ANY person for directions – and by that I mean people who live in that area or are people who’re supposed to know like rickshawwallahs – they’ll either act as if someone had just asked them how to go to the Gare de Lyons in Paris; or more frequently, say “Seedha jake left le lo” (go straight ahead and take a left turn). And I find it amusing and / or irritating (depending on the situation) that in these cases someone will tell you to take a particular road, and when you reach that and ask someone else, they’ll invariably tell you to go in the opposite direction. These insights are what I have gained from years of going to schools at god-forasken places which I’d never even gone to / heard of earlier.

We reached at 10 am – 1.5 hours late – and by that time, the quiz prelims had been conducted, the finalists declared, and lists put up. Plus, other events had started off too. We pleaded with them to consider our case – we were coming halfway across the city too! The HoD gave a very sweet smile, and allowed me and Vivek to attempt the quiz paper, only tell a few minutes later that ‘it won’t be considered since we’ve announced the results’. And then after speaking to a few more people in their club they said they would consider – and then they said they won’t – and then they said they would – you get the idea, don’t you. Our other CW guys had problems too, having reached quite a bit after their event had started. The saving grace was that Arjun got first position in the crossword, and Sid got second position in flash animation.

As for the quiz, it itself was pretty idiotic – we easily got about 20 out of 25 correct. As for the rest, the paper instruction has said that there was negative marking. Only later did we find out that that rule had been scrapped. Sheesh! I’m sure that the stage rounds too would have been yucky, because they’d given such kiddie stuff in the prelims.

In all, a badly screwed up event, which we could have bagged, only if the circumstances had been better. Frankly, I’m pretty angry with their computer club president, whom I’d informed beforehand we might be late and he’d assured that wouldn’t be a problem. I also think that some of the Code Warriors who went there need to work harder, much harder, to ENSURE wins at subsequent events.