"Quiz on the Beach" - TAPMI, Manipal

Forwarding details of a quiz at TAPMI, Manipal:

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Is the possibility of a recession giving you sleepless nights? Do you feel like taking some time off and chilling out? How does a visit to a beach sound? Or would you like to involve yourself in some serious quizzing? What if you were offered the chance of doing both at the same time? Sounds interesting???

T. A. Pai Management Institute's annual B-School fest, Atharva invites you to participate in the Quiz on the Beach (QOTB) to be held at Kaup Beach, Udupi, Karnataka. QOTB is held on the shores of the magical Arabian Sea with an old British built lighthouse serving as a backdrop. So pack your bags and come down to Kaup Beach for some serious fun!!!

Quiz Flavour: Business Quiz
Host: T. A. Pai Management Institute, Manipal
Quiz Master: Mr. Arul Mani
Date: 10th January 2009
Open to Corporates.

Please check out the links below for further details:
Poster and Rules (link to http://www.tapmi.org/atharva/Qotb.pdf)
Atharva - Picasa Album (link to http://picasaweb.google.com/atharva09.tapmi)
Atharva Website (link to http://www.tapmi.org/atharva)
Quiz On The Beach – Registration for Corporates (link to http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=poEj6Zaq5kogDVBjn9YxnXw&hl=en)

For further Clarifications contact:
Puneet Kapoor : 09880885040
S. Gopinath : 09742353966
Nikhil Bhat : 09742502691
E- Mail: atharva09.tapmi@gmail.com

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BCQC - October and November 2008 newsletter

Oblig Question: (1637, Original) French: "Je pense, donc je suis"; Latin: ?

A round up of the last two months of BCQC quizzing. October saw several quizzes, including a BCQC Open Quizzing Day, while November was very, very quiet thanks to a lot of people having to answer more boring questions in exams and such-like.

Quizzes

1. Oct 02 – Oct 04: Mindspark

Mindspark is the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP)'s annual science and technology college fest. Three quizzes, set and conducted by COEP quizzers, were held as part of this, its 2^nd edition.

a. Chakravyuuh: The 9^th edition of Chakravyuuh was held on the 2^nd of Oct. This, an open general quiz, is COEP biggest quiz of the year. Read this report for results.

b. Torquest: This is a Science and Technology quiz only for college students which was won by Abhishek and Raghav. A summary of results here.

c. Barqing Mad!: The report of this open Entertainment quiz can be read here.

2. Oct 12: BCQC Open Quizzing Day

Every two months or so, the BCQC organizes two open quizzes in a formal setting. The morning quiz is usually based on a theme, or is specifically for schools or colleges, or is simply just unconventional. The afternoon quiz is an open General quiz. A list of all these BCQC Open quizzes is available here on our website.

As part of this series, two quizzes were conducted in October.

a. Balls, Ballots, Bollywood: This was an India quiz on politics, cricket, and Hindi films, conducted by J. Ramanand. A full report and analysis can be read here. The quiz-creator assures that the questions will be made available before the year is done! :-)

b. BCQC October General Quiz: A report of this quiz conducted by Apurva and Akhil can be read at this link.

BC Quizzes

We had fewer BC quiz sessions in the last couple of months and no theme quizzes as part of "Requiem for a Theme". Expect this to change in December. BC sessions are informal quizzes in an unusual setting - by the riverside at COEP.

Upcoming Quizzes

The plans for December consist of one or two theme quizzes as part of BC sessions. These will be announced on our mailing lists. December also will see one of India's biggest college events, IIT Bombay's Mood Indigo (20-23 Dec). The website suggests there are a couple of mainstream quizzes (General, Sports) and some fancier ones (Food and Beverages, Travel and Places, and 3 short Lit quizzes).

I've started so I'll finish

* The BCQC was covered by the Times of India. The article can be read online here. Do not, I repeat "do not", take the utterances contained within too seriously. We quiz, we joke.

Incidentally, this story involves what we call a "fox paws". Members of the BCQC were interviewed back in August for this story. A story featuring our photos appeared the next week in this article, with only one tiny problem: the featured group was one with the noble aim of raising voter awareness among Indians. Some of our friends inquired if the BCQC had finally got around to doing something constructive with their time, but we're happy to reassure you that's not quite the case. We do urge you to participate in the electoral process, but if you just want to quiz, that's fine by us too. It's a democracy, after all.

* Curious to know how a quiz is put together? You might be interested in reading about the making of Balls, Ballots, Bollywood (parts one and two).

* If you are in Bombay and looking for quizzing succour, drop by our friends at the Bombay Quiz Club.

* If you are organizing a quiz and want to let people know about it, write into us ("contact"-at-"bcqc.org") with the salient details and we'll put it up on our website.

* We love to hear comments about quizzes, especially those that we do. Use the comments sections on our blog posts to do so

See you at the next quiz!

Answer to Oblig Question: Cogito, Ergo Sum ("I think, therefore I am":: Rene Descartes)

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 2

First apologies to all those who have been asking for a copy of the questions. I'm having some serious trouble with my PC right now that renders me hapless when dealing with MS Office. It'll be out soon.

In Part 1, I explained how I went about collecting the content for my quiz. Hopefully, those who were there were pleasantly surprised by the chosen format. Here's how I went about it:

Format
Most quizzes don't allow for any tactical decisions. An Infinite Rebounds based quiz is uniform, which is kind to the serious quizzer who is fed up of artificial ways to inject drama into quizzes. "Showy" quizzes have disruptive rounds such as buzzers, rounds with very uneven scoring, which may be fun for the audience, but painful for the good teams on stage. But IR can be a tad boring and monotonous. All teams need to do is to focus on the next question, and not worry about any kind of tactics, except for in the odd long connect. It's a classical format, but one for the purists.

Worse, a theme quiz can aggravate these problems further because not everyone is keen on the subject of the quiz. Round-and-round-the-mulberry bush can put you off to zzz-land.

I wanted the format to:

1. Have equal weightage for all three topics
2. Force teams to make a few tactical decisions throughout the quiz
3. Not overly penalise teams who aren't good at any one topic; conversely, don't make it possible for teams who are good at only one theme to get lucky (say, by somehow getting all the questions on one theme in a mixed set)

I chose three separate "sets", one per topic. To normalise performance across sets, teams would get points in a range, depending on their performance in that set. Initially, I thought of assigning scores from 1 to 6 based on position. But that would be unfair if a team completely swept the round - the others still wouldn't be too far away. We have been experimenting with different scoring methods in our BC theme quizzes, so I chose to go for the relative method. The winner of a set gets 5 points; the rest get a score from 0 to 5, relative to the winner's score. So if the winner had 100, they get 5. If the next team gets 80, they end with a relative score of (80/100)*5 = 4. A team gets 65? - a score of 3.25.

The winner would be the team that gets the maximum aggregate across all three sets. This sounded fine, until I realised the flaw.

What if the same team single-handedly won the first two sets? They would have 10, and no one else could catch them. The race for top spot would be over 2/3rds of the way! So I put in a final-within-a-final concept. The teams with the top two scores after the three sets would make it to this last round (as it turned out, I put 3 teams in the finals as 2nd and 3rd were closely clustered). That way, I could ensure interest would remain alive till the end of the three sets. Also, this gave trailing teams a chance to catch up, especially if they could dominate the last round and push the others back.

I designed each set to be identical - after playing around with ideas, I settled on starting with 4 common qns of 5 pts each (10 pts each could allow teams to get a huge lead), followed by IR for 10 qns (initially, I wanted at least 12 so that all 6 teams would be assured of at least 2 qns each, but changed my mind since I had so many common qns).

The last 2 qns (10 pts each) would be for one individual per team. Each person on a team had to take part in a set of their choice. This was one of the tactical questions in the quiz.

I wanted to try this because I think it gives each person a chance to shine, as well as makes it hard for teams to hide a weak member. We have a system where the top 6 teams after the prelims qualify outright, while the next 3 teams are split up and each member added to these 6. In this case, I allowed the teams (in ascending order of scores) to pick a member. Normally, teams would have picked the best possible person (hence, went from lowest to highest, to have somewhat balanced teams), but in this case, they would also have to weigh in the need to have three people with complementary skills.

The other tactical questions:

1. Each team got 1 attempt to go for an answer "out of turn" i.e. you can whisper the answer to the QM without waiting for your chance in IR. I usually keep this to prevent inadvertent sitters which can penalise other teams. The top 2 teams got an additional chance (to compensate for their late chances to pick their 'drafts'). Since teams had only 1 or 2 "out of turn"-ers in the entire quiz, they had to decide when to use it and when to guess that teams ahead of them would be unable to answer.
2. The final round for the top teams had 6 questions, 2 in each topic. Ordinarily, they would get 10 for a correct answer. They could choose to double if confident, with a penalty of -5.

It was interesting to watch teams apply these at various points. I think the rules weren't as confusing as initially feared!

I must confess that the last round could be a little unfair to a team that swept all three sets only to lose in the small last round. My hope was that I would choose questions of equal weight that would reflect the finals and not distort the final standings (not entirely successful in reality). That said, I was prepared to tolerate some unfairness (it was easy as I wasn't participating :-)). I also realised that it is very easy to engineer a close finish if you have very few questions - a common trick employed by most of the 'show pony' quizzes.

Finally, a mention that the 4 starter qns were set around the old game of 'Name, Place, Animal, Thing' and that even the prelims had three sets of 8 qns each. And despite the ineptness of my local photocopy guy, it is probably the first ever horizontal prelims sheet!

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 1

It may be a tad conceited to write about the making of a quiz, but since this was the hardest quiz that I have ever set, I thought it would be interesting to write about the lessons learnt and decisions taken along the way.

The genesis of this quiz was in a bad cricket quiz that I participated in with Harish and others earlier this year. I hadn't been to a good cricket quiz in a long time and felt it was a pity this was such a bad quiz that taught me nothing new or interesting. I had the idea of a "Religions of India" quiz, about cricket, films, and politics. I had never participated in a formal quiz about Indian politics. The closest was a lovely BC quiz by Ganesh Hegde (always the quizzer, never the dancer). I pitched the idea to Harish, but soon, I had begun to form some strange ideas about the format. I requested him to let me go ahead with this alone.

I was wary of doing it alone because I did not (still don't) know a lot about Indian cricket. I had a reasonable interest in politics, but only of the last two decades. Hindi films was much easier (or so I thought). In the end, I estimate it took me about 100 days worth of reading, thinking, and setting to come up with the quiz. I have always been over-enthusiastic about setting quizzes, perhaps to the point of obsession. I spent a great deal of time coming up with my last BC open quiz last November. I guess I like the creative elements of the setting: the anxieties of not having quiz-worthy content, poring over formats and presentations, composing the written parts of the question to be both devious and subtle, and so on.

This time, I had decided not to simply dip my toes into subjects (as sometimes happens in general quiz-settings). Rather, I would try and dive deep by reading as many original sources as possible in the three topics. Setting general quizzes is easier because I collect little nuggets of possibilities each day, from just keeping my eyes and ears open. Come general quiz time, I always have something to begin from. In this case, I was starting with the tank on empty.

My last BC open quiz was hugely complicated - each of the 42 questions seemed to be made up of 2-3 sub-questions. In addition, my experiments with the elims format, a semi-final for the draft picks, elims scoring etc. seemed to make matters worse. I labeled it the "No Smoking" quiz, in reference to the then released Anurag Kashyap film of seemingly equal complexity! I had not intended it to be so much of an indulgent trip, and it provoked some soul-searching. Using the feedback from that quiz and other experiences, I decided the following:

1. Content: keep it as simple as possible, especially since the themes are off-beat. Will stick to post-Independence India.
2. Format: continue to experiment

Content
As a quizzer, each year, I'm astonished at how much we don't know. As a quiz-setter, I'm astonished to discover newer quiz-worthy things to ask. If we ever feel that we've run out of questions, then we're just not looking hard enough. I hoped to convey this very feeling to anyone who came to this quiz wondering what could be asked in these three topics.

I did not want to refer to any specialist quiz books for inspiration. The only option was to read and to do so in copious amounts. I had about three-four months left for my quiz, so I began with the topic I was most ignorant of: Politics.

Long before I planned my quiz, I had bought Ramchandra Guha's India after Gandhi. It is a bit of a tome, but it told me a lot about post-Independence India. Definitely recommended for everyone, especially since we have very few books about 1947 and later. I also read a book about Kashmir Frontline Kashmir by a former BBC correspondent and Cutouts, Caste, and Cine-Stars (by Vasanthi), which is about TN politics. I re-read parts of Vaibhav Purandare's book about the Shiv Sena. Using some hooks from these books, I read a lot of articles online. I had a little bit of a 'quota system' in order to represent both different eras as well as regions, so based on what I already knew, I looked up articles about specific people and groups.

I've come to realise that even the good cricket quizzers don't seem to know a great deal about Indian cricket. Admittedly, it is a very niche topic and potentially, a dry one. Hence, I chose to primarily go for interesting anecdotes rather than stats. A failing of sports quizzes is that they become too personality or stat-oriented. I tried to avoid these. Despite that, 7 of the 8 elims questions on cricket were answered by cricketer's names! I let that be because most of these questions were largely about anecdotes.

BTW, I also did some reading about cricket. Some sources for these: Spin and Other Turns (R. Guha once again), Sandeep Bamzai's book on Bombay cricket, books by Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar's biography (Purandare again), Indian cricket controversies - a bitchy book that I found via Google Books, and of course, the dependable Cricinfo archives.

Thankfully, teams on stage could grapple with questions on both politics and cricket.

Hindi films, something that I'm interested in, turned out to be very slippery at the end. I had left it for late, since I thought I had enough resources and jottings to see me through. I was mistaken. I wanted to ask mainstream Bollywood, so few or no questions on parallel cinema (which has been an easier quizzing fount). I looked at some of the books I owned on this topic, looked at my notes from the Encylopaedia of Indian Cinema, foraged around online, and in the end, just thought of films I owned or had seen. I wanted to have a fairly high percentage of A/V (a first for me, since I am never confident that the supporting audio/visual technology at the quizzing venue will hold up). In the end, I just about made the minimum cut.

This is already a big post, so jottings on the format in a following article.

October General Open Quiz - Report

Set and conducted by: Apoorva Dubey and Akhil
Flavour: General
Participation: ~40 teams

Results:
1st: (B) Vibhendu Tiwari + Nikhil Motlag + J. Ramanand (draft): 140
2nd: (E) Salil Bijur + Yash Tamaskar + Yash Marathe (draft): 105
Jt. 3rd: (C) Suraj Menon + Arnold D'Souza + Kaustubh Bhat (draft): 55
Jt. 3rd: (F) Tushar Kaul + Shiv Anant Tayal + Anand Sivashankar (draft): 55
5th: (D) Suvajit Chakraborty + Aditya Gadre + Roshith Mohan (draft): 50

6th: (A) Gautam + Ramprakash + Sudarshan Shidore (draft): 30

~50 questions in IR; some "free hit" questions; Elims cutoff: top 6: 9, draft: 8; I couldn't record the elims scores

Report
This quiz had the toughest elimination round I can ever recall having attempted. We were lucky to squeeze in as draft picks, with those who didn't losing out on the proverbial hair's breadth. This resulted in a very new (and some would say, fresh) lineup on stage.

Many of the questions in both the finals and elims were good. In fact, some were excellent. However, these were somewhat obscured because several of the remaining questions could have been better framed, or had too many elements to provide. I am not sure if it happened only to us, but we were a little disoriented in the elims! In addition, the coverage of topics was fairly western-centric; however, that is preferable to artificially including topics that don't interest the quiz masters. That said, there were more questions on literature and art than other routine BCQC quizzes. I also liked the science questions.

There was a lot of new things to be learnt in this quiz and that made it worthwhile for me. What did you think? Use the comments to let us know.

Oct 2008 Open morning quiz - "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - Report

Set and conducted by: J. Ramanand
Flavour: Indian Cricket, Indian Politics, Hindi Films
Participation: 29 teams

Results: (with final-within-final scores)
1st: "C-Madan ke Chinese Chakkars" B.V.Harish Kumar + Salil Bijur + Shiv Anant Tayal (draft): 70 pts
2nd: "D-Ranjeet ke Pujaaris" Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari + Nikhil Motlag (draft): 60 pts
3rd: "E-Lotus-eyed Eaters" Amit Varma + Pradeep Ramarathnam + Tushar Kaul (draft) :55 pts
4th: "B-Bob ke Bajrangbaliis" - Suraj Menon + Yash Marathe + Brijesh Nair (draft)
5th: "A-Shetty's Hairraisers" - Saransh Verma + Anubhav Chatterjee + Suvajit Chakraborty (draft)
6th: "F-Hercules ke Muscules" - Subhodeep Jash + Ritoban Sengupta + Abhishek Nagaraj (draft)

Elims
A 24-questions elims (split equally amongst the three topics) saw 9 teams being selected for the finals. I apologise for the problems with the videos; it tooks us three laptops before we could somehow get that going. Despite starting right on time, this snafu set us back by about 30 minutes - I hope it wasn't too inconvenient in the end.

The elims cutoff was 10.5 for the top 6 outright qualifiers, and 9 for the next 3 teams, who were split up in a "draft pick" format. This meant the top 6 teams could pick one of these 6 qualifiers, starting with the 6th-placed team to qualify. Since all three members would have to take part individually in a solo round in the finals, there was a tactical element to this.

The elims scores: A+V(19), H+S (16), S+Y (15), A+P (11.5), S+A & S+R (10.5); Abhishek+Nikhil & Brijesh+Suvajit (10) , Shiv + Tushar (9).

Finals
This consisted of three identically formatted rounds, one on each topic. Each round began with a set of four common questions for 5 pts each, followed by 10 questions on Infinite Rebounds (10 pts each), ending with 2 qns of 10 each. The last two had to be simultaneously attempted by one representative from each time. Teams were then allotted scores relative to the top score in the round (from 0 to 5).

True to billing, Team E pipped C to the top spot in the cricket set, and picked up all 5 relative points. Scores were evenly spread out in this section. However, the battle picked up in politics, with C & D sharing honours, and staying ahead of the rest. The final section was surprisingly one-sided, even though the Vibhendu-led attack of Team D swept the standings as expected. Teams A, B, and C were expected to do better, but couldn't. Unfancied F, who had been struggling till then, were a surprise 2nd place.

Finals-within-Finals
The top two teams after the regular finals were D & C (final scores in the image above). However, Team E was also admitted to the last round because they were fairly close to the top two. This last round consisted of 6 qns, 2 from each topic. Open to all three in simultanous-mode, the default scoring was 10 for a correct answer. However, if confident, teams could choose to double it but with a penalty of -5.

The first cricket qn was found to be too cryptic (perhaps even bad!). E took control of the 2nd by correctly doubling. The other two did not score, leaving the underdogs on top. E further drove in the advantage by doubling their first politics qn. C too answered correctly, but did not dare double. D got this wrong. Scores were daringly placed at C=10, D=0, E=40.

The 2nd politics question was too easy for all teams: they each cracked 20. C=30, D=20, E=60. It looked like it would be E's quiz to lose from now on.

Alas, the first films question was correctly taken on the double by both C & D, but E, playing it safe, could not answer. One question to go, and we had C=50, D=40, E=60. It was anyone's game from here. In case of ties, the team with the higher score after the main finals would win. All teams had to double this one irrespective of their answer in order to win.

The last question caused a lot of hair-scratching. Eventually C & D submitted their answers. E agonised over whether to double (they had to, otherwise D would win if they got the question right on tie-breakers), and then on the answer.

They picked the wrong one. C & D both got it right. Scores: C: 70, D: 60, E: 55.

C won the quiz as a result.

Final comments
I leave it to the participants (both finalists and others) to comment about whether they liked the questions and the format. I will put up a separate post on some of the "design" decisions behind the quiz. I must add that the format was always likely to be a little unfair to a team or two. D lost narrowly despite their leading performance in both the elims (a 3 pt margin) and the main finals (a 1.5 pt margin). But they were fairly nice about it :-). Thanks also to a patient audience, some of whom gave some terrific answers that had nonplussed even the finalists.

Thanks to everyone who came to the quiz, to Amit, Suraj & Yash for helping out with the scoring, and to Suvajit for timely help with the laptop.

I will try to make the questions available after suitable post-production.

BCQC Open Quizzes - October

We’re back with the next set of BCQC Open quizzes. Here are the details:

When: Sunday, 12th October, 2008 Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems Ltd., Senapati Bapat Road (need directions? See http://bcqc.org/?q=participate)

What Quiz 1: “Balls, Ballots, Bollywood” – a three-in-one quiz on Indian cricket, Indian politics and Hindi films Reporting Time: 9:15 am Quiz Time: 9:30 am to 1 pm By: J. Ramanand

Quiz 2: October General Quiz  Reporting Time: 2:15 pm Quiz Time: 2:30 pm to 6 pm By: Akhil and Apurva

How: (same for both quizzes) Teams of 2 members (don't have a teammate? don't worry, you might find one at the venue) Top 9 teams for the finals No prior registration needed, no entry fees, open for all

Prizes Sponsored by Landmark, Pune Prizes for all finalists Prizes for Best School and Best College teams

Contact Email: contact - at - bcqc_dot_org Phone: Ramanand (97642 58560), Salil (98231 12258)

BarQing Mad! - Entertainment quiz at MindSpark '08

Set by : Yasho Tamaskar , Aditya Gadre , Aniket Khasgiwale .

Conducted BY : Yasho Tamaskar

Results:
1st : J Ramanand and BV HArish Kumar : 145
2nd : Salil Bijur and Suraj Menon : 115
3rd : Suvajit Chakraborty and Sayak Dasgupta : 100
4th : Akhil and Apoorva : 95
5th : Meghashyam Shirodkar and Venkat Srinivasan : 55
6th : Mihir Muley and Chinmay Nivargi : 15

Format: 42 seamless IR , Two long connects

The quiz was quite entertaining with 4 teams doing well fighting it out for the top three spots . JR and BVHK gave some great answers and cracked both themes before everyone else . Suraj and Salil gave some brilliant answers but lost out due to the theme rounds. Ahkil and Apoorva and Salil and Suraj were tied upto the last round but were beaten as they didn't get the theme. Last years winners ,Suvajit and Sayak didn't seem to be on top form and missed a few easy ones. They did make a big comeback in the last round to just pip Akhil and Apoorva to third place.

Torquest 2008

Set by : Kaustubh Bhat , aniket Khasgiwale , Mohit Karve , Aditya Bhedasgaonkar , Avnish Dhongde and Aditya Gadre

Conducted By : Kaustubh Bhat
Results:
1st : Abhishek Nagaraj and Raghav Chakravarthy - 145 pts
2nd : Saransh Verma and Karan Chawla - 60 pts (won on higher elims score)
3rd : Suvajit Chakraborty and Amit Dandekar - 60 pts
4th : PS Sriram and Omkar Nene - 50 pts
5th : Rohan Pandit and Varad Deshmukh - 40 pts
6th : Rohan Jain and Dhruv Chadha - 10 pts

Leave opinions and suggestions in Comments section.

Chakravyuh 2008

Set by : Aditya Gadre and Aniket Khasgiwale with Kaustubh Bhat and Yasho Tamaskar in supporting roles. Gaurav Sabnis made a sweeping cameo with several questions for the finals and the elims.

Conducted by : Aditya and Aniket

Standings (elim score in brackets):
1st : J Ramanand and BV Harish Kumar : 110 pts (28)
2nd : Amit Varma and Sumant Srivathsan : 90 pts (25)
3rd : Sarat Rao and S Balakrishnan : 70 pts (24)
4th : Meghashyam Shirodkar and Amit Garde : 60 pts (25)
4th : Salil Bijur and Yash Marathe : 60 pts (24)
6th : Prasann Potdar and Mukund Krishnan : 50 pts (24)

QM's notes : (JR will be putting up unbiased detailed report later)
- Simple elims just like last year . The cut off was 24 . The top six teams were very close on elims score.
- Finals : We tried as much as possible to make good questions on all topics. Some topics were slightly neglected (Current affairs , Literature, Art to name a few)
-Though there seamed to be some simpler ones , as far as I remember , there was no god-awful sitter as such.
- An altercation-free finals would have been desirable , but unfortunately that was not to be. Maybe a more clear policy on part marks is needed.
-Also a final without questions falling prey to the finger of god would be awesome but Kaustubh Bhat goes into the record books by managing to fit in the finger of god even with a flash presentation.
-We apologise for the lighting and state of the auditorium. The college really let us down in that department.
- As for the result , Ramanand and Harish gave some really good answers and finally broke their string of four consecutive bridesmaid trophies with an excellent and deserved win. Sumant and Amit also gave some great answers to give Ramanand and Harish some stiff competition for most of the quiz.

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Participant's views Report by Ramanand:

Chakravyuuh 2008 - Report and Results An excellent Chakravyuuh once again. The elims were felt to be on the easier side, but that was a sentiment pronounced mainly by the 'experienced' lot. The setters had designed it so that most people could do reasonably well at the preliminary stage. The result was a high range of 24-28 for the finalists.

Several questions in the finals were brilliant. Despite some of these being unanswered by anyone, the answers were of the "should have thought of that" variety. A nice variety of themes, especially some good Indian questions.

There were a few odd easy ones, but I don't think that affected the standings too much. All teams had their share of excellent answering, and the final result clusters do not completely reflect the closeness of the contest.

Both quizmasters took us through the quiz with a very competent air; in addition, the partly refurbished COEP auditorium made it an easier place to quiz compared to the exhaustion of the past. The quiz was simple in format too, with the setters resisting the temptation to add unnecessary frills.

On a personal note, our team won its first Chakravyuuh in its 6th attempt, with 4 of those attempts ending in a runner-up's bridesmaid gown. (Old-timers will recall that Harish and I were among the organisers for the first ever Chakravyuuh quiz and so have treated this is a performance at 'home', hence the desire to win it at least once!)

Participants are invited to post your views on the quiz in the comments section. Any comments , opinions or suggestions will be useful to the quiz organisers. The quiz was organised under the aegis of "Mindspark", COEP's flagship technical event, and there are two more quizzes coming up on Friday (Technical) and Saturday (Entertainment).

Do leave opinions/suggestions in the Comments section.

Quiz for the Poona School and Home for the Blind

On the 21st of October, the BCQC conducted a quiz for the the Poona School and Home for the Blind as part of their 75th anniversary celebrations. There were two challenges and 'firsts' for us: one, the quiz was to be held in Marathi, and second, some of the participants had little or no ability to see.

Thirty teams (of 3 members each, mostly teachers) took the preliminaries. The quiz was conducted by Niranjan Pedanekar, with the questions set by members of the BCQC. Despite many being first-time quizzers, the participants did very well, making it very hard to separate the six top teams.

The finals were conducted with great elan and enthusiasm by Niranjan. The finals lasted for about an hour, consisting of simple but largely 'workable' questions passed using IR (yes, we didn't desist from using all that!), including an audio round. Here, at times, Niranjan even sang some of the questions, eliciting spontaneous 'once more'-s from the appreciative audience.

Finally, the team of Sanjay, Shamrao, and Damodar won easily (they were the best team on stage, with Mr. Damodar - who is visually handicapped - giving some very good answers). The participants and organisers told us they had immensely enjoyed the programme, which was very novel and interesting to them.

In turn, we would also like to thank the School, particularly Mrs. Nagaraj, for having invited us to do the quiz. It was a very good experience for us as well.

BCQC - September 2008 newsletter

BCQC - September 2008 newsletter

Oblig Question: In 1868, geologist Louis Lartet discovered 5 skeletons in a rock shelter in the Dordogne region of Central France. What was the name of these rock shelters?

It was such a busy September for the BCQC, so we decided it was time we had our own newsletter! This quizzing month was unusually busy because many of us were not only participating in quizzes, but also organising them. But largely, we had fun, and hopefully, our hapless victims will agree as well :-). This newsletter is designed to share some of the recent happenings involving the BCQC, and to give some of the BC expats a chance to catch up, and to provide everyone advance notice on what is coming next.

~~~~Quizzes we organised in September~~~~

1. Sept 18: ACES school quiz: Once again, we were part of the ACES school quiz, now in its 4th edition. Set by the BCQC and admirably conducted by Salil, the quiz was won by St. Mary's School (Boys) in a terrific contest. All the details can be read here.

2. Sept 21: Poona School and Home for the Blind: The most unusual quiz we have done so far, this short quiz was held completely in Marathi for teams consisting of both sighted and visually afflicted members. Conducted by Niranjan Pedanekar. Read this report for details and a few photos.

3. Sept 20: NIT, Surat - Entru Meet Biz Quiz: A business quiz conducted by Suvajit for NIT Surat

4. Sept 26: AIT, Pune - Akriti Internal Quiz: A internal ranking quiz for quizzers of the Army Institute of Technology. Set by Suvajit and Yash along with others, and conducted by Suvajit.

5. Sept 21: School quiz for Rotaract Club event, Srujan: This quiz for schoolkids was set by Meghashyam Shirodkar, who unfortunately could not conduct it due to illness. Yash Marathe, along with Aditya Gadre and Yash Tamaskar, conducted this quiz.

~~~~BC Quizzes~~~~

Despite the heavy organisational loads, we had the usual quota of BC quiz sessions on weekends. We also had an India quiz as part of our Theme League, conducted by Harish. The latest updates on the league can be seen here.

BTW, our sessions are informal and open to all, so if you haven't tasted pleasant outdoor informal quizzing by a river, come by one session.

~~~~Other Quizzes~~~~

Karan and Jaipal of MIT organised a General Quiz "Abhivyakti", a small report of which you can see here on our quiz blog.

~~~~October Quizzes~~~~

The first week of October is choc-a-bloc with quizzes: beginning with PICT, then three quizzes at COEP (including the annual highlight 'Chakravyuuh'). That same weekend sees the finals of the Durga Puja quiz organised by the local Bengali society.

Also, the next BCQC Open Quizzing Day (delayed from its original schedule in September) will be held on October 12, Sunday. As usual, we have two quizzes:

Morning: A theme quiz on Indian politics, Indian cricket and Hindi Films (by Ramanand) Evening: A general quiz (by Apoorva and Aditya) These quizzes will have prizes co-sponsored by Landmark, Pune. The details will be updated on this page.

~~~~I've started so I'll finish~~~~

* We're trying to put up some of our quizzes in a publicly share-able repository. You'll hear more about it in the coming months. * Our site has an events pane on the right side - please use it to monitor news of quizzes around the corner * We love to hear comments about quizzes, especially those that we do. Use the comments sections on our blog posts to do so * If you want to submit events or ask us something, mail us at "contact"-at-"bcqc.org"

We'll see you at the next quiz!

Answer to Oblig Question: Cro-Magnon

Quiz fest at CoEP

CoEP will be organising a quiz fest as a part of the annual technical event MindSpark

There will be three quizzes:

2nd October - Chakravyuh - General Open quiz
Details: General quiz .Teams of two. NO restrictions . Anyone can take part. Rs 30/- registration per team.
Time: 12:45 pm ..
Venue: College of engineering Pune.

3rd October - Torquest - Technical Quiz
Details: Science and Technology quiz. Teams of two. College students only (UG or PG) You'll need your College I card. Rs 30/- per team for registration.
Time: 1:45pm
Venue: College of Engineering Pune

4th October - BarQing Mad ! - Open Entertainment quiz.
Details: Entertainment (Tv , Movies and music) quiz. Teams of two. NO restrictions. It's an Open quiz. Rs 30/- per team for registration.
Time: 9:45am
Venue: College of Engineering Pune

Prizes:
Total cash prizes of about Rs 50,000/- to be won.

In case of any queries you can contact : Aditya at 9881101291 , Aniket at 9766043385 , Yash at 9970519559 .

MIT Abhivyakti General OPEN Quiz

Set and Conducted by : Karan And Jaipal

Standings:
1st: Suvajit Chakraborty and Aditya Gadre : 60 pts
2nd: Yash Marathe and BV Harish Kumar : 30 pts
*3rd: Kunal Pungaliya and Keyur Munot : 20 pts
4th : Yash Tamaskar and Kaustubh Bhat : 20 pts
5th : Karan Chawla and saransh Varma : 20 pts
6th: Kaushik S and Siddharth Cavale : 15 pts

* won on tiebreak

The quiz was a decent debut effort though very very short. A 30 question elim was followed by a 24 question final . Just 24 questions in an Open quiz was a bit of a disappointment. There were a few repeated questions , quite a few sitters and some arbit stuff , but this could all be forgiven since it was after all their first time.
A few positives about the quiz were the punctuality - The quiz started and ended on time and the fact that they used IR and not D&P as most new QMs end up using.

ACES School quiz 2008

Set by : members of BCQC
Conducted by Salil Bijur.

Standings:
1st : Aditya Kaustubhan , Ashwin Bhide , Shatrunjay Mall [St Mary's (Boys)] - 110 pts
2nd : Rohit Telang ,Abhishek Pandit , Rushabh Banthia [Symbiosis Secondary] - 95 pts
3rd : Rohit Sahasrabudhe , Rohan Danait , Sanket Bhilare [Abhinav Vidyalaya] - 80 pts
4th : Vipluv Shetty , Shreeharsh Godbole , Ambarish Prabhu [Loyola High School]- 70 pts
5th : Punarrasu Pendse , Siddharth JAdhav, Prachi Tadsane [Kalmadi Shamrao High School] - 65 pts
6th : Mohit TEndulkar , Khuzehua Shipchandler , Kaustubh Wagh [St. Vincents High School] - 60 pts

Elims: Symbiosis(21) , Kalmadi Shamrao (18) , St Mary's (16), Abhinav (16), Loyola (15), St Vincents (15)

Format: 48 questions seamless IR , 8 question written theme round.

The quiz was a very closely fought one with the top three finishing within 30 points.
St Mary's put on a great show and steadily built up their momentum to take the lead in the third round . They didn't let it go throughout the quiz with some brilliant answers and deservedly won. Abhinav and Symbiosis started slowly with Loyola and Vincents fighting for 2nd and 3rd place .
At the end of the 8th round Mary's had quite a comfortable lead , Loyola and Abhinav were tied for second and Kalmadi had just got their act together and leapfrogged Vincents to third place.
The theme round probabaly had a bit too much weightage (40 pts for cracking the theme early)considering that the top team had scored just 65 points in 48 questions. Symbiosis cracked the theme on their second shot and went into the joint lead . Mary's cracked it on their third shot and took back the sole lead. Abhinav soon cracked the theme themselves and completed the top three .

The atmosphere was awesome though the crowd seemed a little disappointed at the end that Abhinav didn't win. Salil did a great job of conducting the quiz and completed the quiz on time .

Tata Crucible 2008 – Pune round report

There was a huge turnout of participants and viewers and the QM said that it was probably the toughest round of TC 2008. Nice set of elims. As usual, the elims were followed by the finals of the Tata track which had a few 'firsts'. Arnab B from TIFR qualified for the finals; probably the first all-woman team in TC finals from TCS consisted of Abha Shah and Sowmya, who is Arnab's wife. In fact, Arnab and Sowmya's daughter accompanied them on to the stage and took turns in sitting with the TCS and TIFR teams! The team from TAL which had the two members boasting of a 'cumulative experience of 4 finals of the Crucible, Pune edition' were consistent through the rounds and eventually won. TCS came second.

The non-Tata track finals was also quite interesting. Vasu's team stood 7th in the elims and just missed out qualifying on a tie-break question. The finalists were Infosys (Jay +1), ZS Associates, BMC Software (Harish + Shubhadeep), Kotak Mahindra (Samrat and Ashit - they travelled from Mumbai), IBM India (old fogey from AIT - Nikhil Lasrado +1) and Cognizant Tech. Solutions ( Chetan K + Gagan Jain).

The rounds were interesting and different and because many of the questions were on buzzer, not having IR didn't pain that much. The only crib was that on more than a couple of questions on the buzzer, the QM gave teams time to think for a long time. We also benefited from this on one question. So probably can't complain a LOT. :)

Kotak Mahindra were the eventual winners with 65 points while BMC Software were runners-up on 45 points. (Need to confirm the final standings and score - I think Infosys finished third on 15 points). All in all, a very engaging quiz, especially for a biz quiz. The prizes were good and the whole event was managed quite well. As expected, Suvajit added to his winnings from quizzes - this time as a member of the audience, only because this quiz was only for the corporates.

The Pune edition will be aired on CNBC on 6th September at 1800 hours. The repeat telecast is on 7th September at 1730 hours.

:: Report by Harish, who finished 2nd. Corrections/missing information plugs welcome.

ReQuiem for a Theme : League Quiz 2

The next quiz in the Theme League will be taking place this Sunday , the 10th of August, at 1:30 pm at the Boat Club lawns , College of Engineering , Pune.

Details:

The Quiz will be a Science and Technology quiz set by Mohit Karve.
It's an Open quiz and anyone's allowed to take part.
Quiz will start with a written elims (so get a pen /pencil / quill/ other writing instrument). The top 10 participants will be divided into 5 teams and the others will be randomly distributed to the five teams (these people will get only half the points though).

In case of any queries mail us : contact(at)bcqc(dot)org

Update: see the Theme League homepage for details. Comments on that page only.

The Interrogative 2008

Report for BCQC's annual school quiz 'The Interrogative' written by QM Maitreyi Gupta.

The BCQC’s annual school quiz

The second year of The Interrogative saw more than 80 teams from 18 schools around the city. The results as follows:

(Finals rank: School (Team members): finals score: elims score (stars))
1st: Abhinav Vidyalaya (Rohan Danait, Sanket Bhilare): 115 : 20 (5)
2nd: Vikhe Patil (Amol Joshi, Omkar Dhakephalkar): 105: 18 (5)
3rd: Symbiosis Secondary (Abhishek Pandit, Rushab Bainthia): 90: 20 (5)
4th: Abhinav Vidyalaya (Rohit Sahasrabudhe, Satyavrat Wagle): 80: 17 (6)
Joint 5th: St. Mary's Boys (Shatrunjay Mall, Akshay Agarwal): 70: 16 (5)
Joint 5th: Bal Shikhan Mandir (Siddharth Khole, Sumedh Kaulgud): 70: 15 (5)
7th: Symbiosis Secondary (Ankur Borwankar, Rohit Telang): 45: 17 (4)
8th: P. Jog High School (Atharva Kunte, Amoghsiddhi Bhandarkar): 20: 16 (5)

Special mention: Shreedhar Kale and Maitreya Ghorpade from Symbiosis Secondary School missed qualification by 2 star questions. They had 15(3)

Best School: Symbiosis Secondary School

The Best School Trophy was given to the School whose top 3 teams had the highest combined elimination Score.

Quiz Masters: Yash Marathe, Maitreyi Gupta

Elims: 30 questions, 6 stars. Highest was 20 and the cut off was 15 with 5 stars. Lots of teams scored between 12 and 15 so it turned out to be an average difficulty elim

Quiz Master’s notes:

1. Good turnout in spite of on-going tests in some schools. 80 teams is no small figure. A few schools sent as many as 10 teams.

2. Teams reported on time. Can’t say the same about some of the quizmasters ;)

3. Cash prizes were a big plus point. Audience prizes were BCQC keychains. Trophies for the winning team and best school.

4. Quiz started on time and ended at 1pm instead of 12.30. We lost time in the elims. Elims should have been 25 ques rather than 30.

5. We made a lot of new questions for this quiz. Tried to keep as many workable questions as possible.

6. Quiz was liberally sprinkled with pictures to support the answers.

7. Choice of elim questions: they were meant to be easy – turned out to be of moderate difficulty.

8. I think we covered most genres. Even so, the emphasis was on geography and history.

9. New format for the elim sheet – sheet included a space for rough work (questions were displayed on the screen), for jotting down the question or to note multiple answers before deciding the final one. There was a points column as well. The aim was to reduce checking time and increase accuracy of checking.

10. We should have made a filler quiz – for around 10 mins after we finished discussing answers, teams were moving around the audi to sit with their school friends (we had separated them in the beginning)

11. Lack of volunteers due to various reasons – too much work for the few people who did show up.

12. A few goof-ups in the finals because of me : 2 finals’ questions were scrapped because I accidentally clicked a button.

13. Round 1 was a connect round – each question should have carried 5 points rather than 10. Some teams who cracked the connect had got an unfair lead.

14. Note to self and others: Most black and white pictures don’t show up well on the screen.

We would like a feedback about the questions from the finalists and audience. Please leave your comments in the comments box.

:: Maitreyi

BCQC July Open

Set by : Sumant Srivathsan, Rajiv Rai, Avinash Mudaliar (Bombay Quiz Club)
Conducted By : Sumant

Results:
1st: J Ramanand and Suvajit Chakraborty : 53 pts
2nd: Vibhendu Tiwari and Sarat Rao :48pts
3rd: Kunal Sawardekar and Aditya Gadre :47 pts
4th: Amit Garde and Anand Sivashankar :43 pts
5th: Bikash and Roshith :17pts
6th:Arnold D'souza + Saransh Verma : 16pts

Format: 48 seamless IR , 4 mini-themes of 3 questions each , one long connect and one written round.
Elims cut-off: 16.5pts

The quiz was very good to say the least.The elims were very all very well framed , interesting questions .In the finals all the questions were excellent , most of them were workable and not obscure. It was nice to see the heavy use of audio-visuals in the quiz. Sumant did a great job of conducting the quiz.
Another good thing about this quiz was the length. I loved the fact that this quiz was not wrapped up in a hurry and none of the teams were pressurised into answering quickly. The whole thing was conducted at a very relaxed pace which ,in my humble opinion, goes a great way in making the quiz fun.
Ramanand and Suvajit put in a great performance to win this extremely closely fought quiz with barely 3 questions separating the first four teams.

Please give us your views on the quiz in the comments section. Any comments , opinions or suggestions are welcome.

BCQC July Open Quizzes

Quiz 1: “The Interrogative” School Quiz – 2008 Edition

Date 27th July, 2008 (Sunday)
Time 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (reporting time: 9:00 a.m.)
Venue Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Bhageerath, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd. (Behind Dominos Pizza), Senapati Bapat Road, Pune – 16
Flavour General
Teams Two members per team (from Class VII to X); Teammates can be from different classes
Conducted by Maitreyi Gupta, Yash Marathe, Rohit Khaladkar

Prizes
* All finalists will receive prizes and certificates; Winners will also receive a trophy each; Audience prizes
* The school contingent with the best performance will receive a “Best School” trophy.
* Prizes worth a total of Rs.12,000/-
* The prizes are co-sponsored by Landmark, Pune.

How to register
Prior registrations are required, though some on-the-spot registrations can be accepted. Schools have been sent invitation letters. Interested participants are requested to contact their principal/teacher-in-charge. If your school has not received an invitation, please get in touch with us to register directly.

The last day for registrations is Friday, 25th July, 2008.

* Registrations can be done over the phone or by email:
- Phone: J Ramanand: 97642 58560 / Salil Bijur: 98231 12258 / Maitreyi Gupta: 98224 77068
- Email: contact@bcqc.org (with a copy to ramanand@gmail.com, salilb@gmail.com, maitreyigupta@gmail.com)
* Required Details:
- Names and Classes of the participants
- Contact details of a Teacher-in-charge.
* There is no registration fee. All participants are requested to carry their School I-Cards. Participants are requested not to carry food or beverages to the venue. Parents and teachers are also welcome to come and watch the quiz.

Quiz 2: Open General Quiz

Date 27th July, 2008 (Sunday)
Time 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. (reporting time: 2:15 p.m.)
Venue Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Bhageerath, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd. (Behind Dominos Pizza), Senapati Bapat Road, Pune – 16
Flavour General
Team Size Two members per team
Conducted by Sumant Srivathsan (Bombay Quiz Club)

Prizes For all finalists, audience prizes, best school and college teams
Co-Sponsor Landmark, Pune

Contact
Phone: J Ramanand: 97642 58560 / Salil Bijur: 98231 12258
Email: contact@bcqc.org

Entry is free for all quizzes. The afternoon quiz needs no prior registration.

Encyclo-media

Amit Varma was kind enough to pick up some fragments of mine for an interesting article on quizzing. Serious quizzing still remains very niche, a masonic sub-culture of sorts, but it takes a quiz-geek to know there are three ways of looking at every intersection, even if it only seems to be a straight road.

Anyway, as Amit mentions in the end of his post, check out Niranjan's primers (1, 2, 3.) on setting quizzes (to which I've made a small contribution). Perhaps they need a little touching-up, but they're perennially relevant.

In other news, a certain Salil Bijur catapulted into top spot in the rankings of the local BCQC Page 3 Quizzers League given his recent appearance in this pub quiz (scroll past the large expanses of skin to the bottom - I must admit that doesn't sound very decent). It didn't go all according to plan since he missed the question on the country with the oldest flag (Denmark), a sitter if there ever was. Too bad they weren't serving chestnuts with the drinks :-)

Landmark Pune Quiz 2008 - Report

Date: 28 Jun, 2008
Venue: Nehru Memorial Hall
Conducted by: Derek O'Brien
Turnout: ~250 teams

Open Quiz Final Results
1st: Rajiv Rai, Sumant Srivathsan, Vibhendu Tiwari ('Travelling Pillsburies')
2nd: Anand Sivashankar, Meghashyam Shirodkar, Amit Garde ('Aam Junta')
3rd: J. Ramanand, B.V.Harish Kumar, Niranjan Pedanekar (full name for the effing record!: 'Encyclopiidith: The Factually Harassed')
4th: Suvajit Chakraborty, Sayak, Abhishek ('Symbiosis Law School - Questionable Characters')
Other finalists: 'W.G.Disgrace' (Govind Grewal, Mukund Sridhar, Pradeep Ramaratnam), 'Softwariyaan' (Ramanathan, Abha, Jai), 'Infosys-SHA' (Harshal, Siddharth, Abhik), 'Demon Barbers of Fleet Street' (Venkat, Raj K, Maitreyi)

Best Corporate Team: Infosys-SHA (Pune)
Best College Team: Symbiosis Law School
Best School Teams: 1st: Army Public School, 2nd: Muktangan
Quizzer of the Year: Ramanand (Other finalists: Anand S, Suvajit, Rajiv, Mukund, Ramanathan)

Report
Quizzes like these make you wonder why we quiz. At last year's edition, a mix of curiosity, high stakes, and competitiveness accompanied most of us (it was the first Landmark quiz in these parts, after all). Since then and especially after yesterday, the answer is quite clear: we go to these quizzes for the big denomination vouchers.

For it's hard to derive any pride at doing well at a sub-zero-content quiz where performance can be a function of pure luck. Last year's experience did leave us wise enough to lower our expectations close to -273 degrees K. What we didn't expect was an elimination round of pristine silliness. Several multiple choice questions ("what prevents bad breath better: mint or chewing gum?") left people tossing coins to decide answers. I know I am a jaundiced 'intellectual-quizzer' type who doesn't get the fact that these are populist questions, the answers to which probably everyone in the hall has heard of. But even the least bilious quizzer there would probably agree with me on the almost complete un-interesting-ness of the elims. Whatever good there was, was buried under insipid framing and very little time to ponder.

I am generally in favour of 'pole position' points (i.e. the elims toppers begin with some points relative to their performance so far), but I hate the Landmark system of multiplying the difference by 5. Derek tried to justify this saying this gives the top teams some buffer in case they have a couple of bad rounds. But the magnitude of this buffer almost always completely shuts out the bottom teams, because three rounds later, the bottom two leave. There is no prevention of skew.

Anyway, that was the least of the problems. In several cases, two consecutive questions were either too easy or too tough. Since, a direct-pass system was followed, some teams either made points in quick succession or had little opportunity to do so. I'll admit that my team was lucky in the first half of the team, pushing us into the lead.

We led until the penultimate round. There were four teams left as the round (all connects, and in what would be crucial, 15 points per answer) commenced. We led Aam Junta by 5 points, and Travelling... by about 25 points (IIRC). "Aam Junta" got a question showing a visual of Deepika Padukone. Asked to give a "three word" answer, naturally, they said "Om Shanti Om". They got half for that (taking the lead), while "Travelling Pilsburys" completed the answer to get another 7. We then get the (routine) toughie for that round (Carla Bruni singing, and the arch to Champs Elysees). No one scores. Then "Questionable Characters" get a question with a (very obvious) "BuDDhaa" connect (clip from Navin Nischol's "BuDDha Mil Gaya", muted song from "Sangam", Rakhi Sawant in "BuDDhaa Mar Gayaa" - yikes). They got most of it right, but no halves. TP completed it to get all 15. They then got one of those chestnut-of-chestnuts (the kind that sits on Ravi Shastri's Audi reading "Midnight's Children"): connect the cover of 'Catcher in the Rye' and 'Mark David Chapman'. With that 15, TP made 37 in the round, catapulting them to the lead. We couldn't be blamed for being more than slightly nonplussed as we left the stage :-)

The last (buzzer) round was tight, but TP held on, despite some good answering by Anand for Aam Junta.

There are many words to describe the "brain of pune" round (I had already called it "silly" last time), so perhaps we should just pick 'lousy' and 'atrocious'. 12 questions, each with just two options, such as choosing between "fact or fiction" or "who was born first, Indira Nooyi or Kiran Shaw" or "which is taller, the Qutub Minar or the statue of Christ the Redeemer", +5/-10 (no value for risk). Like last year, I answered just one question right to win, while Anand (and Suvajit) came 2nd by doing nothing, while the rest were fobbed off by the negatives. Simply awful. I'm going to have to lobotomize myself next time if I win.

I suppose we ought not to complain, given the luck we'd had in the elims (some of the elims' 'coin tosses' spun for us) and in the first 2/3rds of the finals (we got some sleepers like the questions on Hollywood, Barack Obama, the by-now cliched 22 yards chain). It's just that different teams got different returns for roughly the same amount of luck. I think most of us finalists were slightly embarassed by what we had just participated in.

On the positive side, there was a good turnout (it was roughly the same as last year, though it seemed greater), and vocal too. We saw some good answers by Aam Junta, and many from the audience (including the Katarias, who were terrific). Derek was more bearable than I have ever encountered, and dare I say, even entertaining with his wisecracks. Last year, we had complained about how none of the teams that finished 4-8 got any prizes, so it was good to see that was not the case this year. Also, credit is due to Landmark for continuing to put together a quiz of this scale in these parts.

But as a quizzer, there was hardly anything to be happy about, bar the mercenary prizes. From what I have heard and read about the Chennai Landmark quiz, they seemed to have struck a balance between populism and asking interesting things. I really don't think it shouldn't be that hard to achieve. The large adoring masses may not have seen better, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to "get" better quizzes. I know that some of the smaller quizzes we do on the circuit tend to be insular and tough, but "even" we can see that there's a path in the middle. Perhaps the worst indictment of last year's Pune Landmark quiz was that try as we might, some of us couldn't remember too many of the questions or events of last time (Niranjan even insisted that it was just a two-member event last time :-)). Apart from some of the painful moments, I suspect a similar fate awaits the 2008 Landmark quiz.

Update: 3 July
Anubhav and Vijay have patiently recorded the elims here.

The Landmark Pune Quiz 2008

Landmark Pune are organising a quiz on the evening of 28th of June, 2008 at Nehru Memorial Hall.

Details:

* Teams of upto 3 members.
* Venue: Nehru Memorial Hall, Camp, Pune
* 28th of June 2008, 3pm.
* Quizmaster: Derek O'Brien

* Prizes

(All prizes are in form of Landmark Gift Vouchers)
- First place – Rs. 30000
- Second place – Rs. 15000
- Third place – Rs. 9000
- Best corporate team – Rs. 6000
- Best team name – Rs. 3000
- Best school team – Rs. 6000 (students of upto class 12 are eligible)
- Best school team runner up – Rs. 3000 (students of upto class 12 are eligible)
- Quizzer of the year – Rs. 5000
- Plus attractive audience prizes.

* Registration needs to be done in advance. The organizers will be assigning seats, and so it is recommended that you register early so as to avoid last minute crowding.

* To register, walk into Landmark (Next to Dorabjee's), Moledina Road, Camp, Pune anytime before the 28th of June. You can register for your friends just as well. You could call 40068888 for details.

Shrirang Raddi on Mastermind

One of the founding fathers of BC quizzing, Shrirang Raddi, is participating in this year's edition of Mastermind. That probably makes him the only person to have participated in both the UK as well as the Indian versions of the show (if you know of others who have done so, let us know).

It is worthwhile to note that Shrirang (who also won the Brand Equity Quiz in 2000-01) was the highest scorer (nationwide) in the written qualifiers for Mastermind India 2002. Due to a series of toxic events, he did not progress beyond Round 1 of that edition (subject: "Poisonous Snakes of India").

Which is why we're happy to report that the venerable senior has cruised into the next round of the UK version (subject: "The First Kashmir War 1947-48"). Tally-Ho! and Yoicks! to him for the next round.

Mahaquizzer 2008 - Results

The Mahaquizzer national top 100 is finally out. You can peruse the entire list here.

Congratulations are in order to Arul Mani for comprehensively topping (even if he did a Tendulkar-'07). Only 5 people achieve the 80+ mark, the level which many people claim should debar them from taking Mahaquizzer again ;)

Congratulations are also in order to (Pune winner) Ramanand for a decent showing, even though he just misses out on the national top 10.

Update: The list of city-wise winners (by category) is also up.

Faux Pass

So this is not uncommon. Yasho (that Hashmi-like molester of unsuspecting horses) speaks ruefully of being led by years of quizzing which gives you that immensely dangerous tendency to make wild stabs at questions en passant, Don Quixote style.

(He also mentions that story of Salil saying"pass" in an exam.)

I had the same experience once. Fresh from losing COEP's annual Chakravyuuh (the first of our four glorious bridesmaid trophies there), I found myself at one of the few competitive exams I have ever had to take. Having felt that I was overly cautious at that quiz (leading to our loss), I went in, tilting at the windmills, like Shahid Afridi chasing a half-volley to the ends of the earth.

It ended badly. Very badly. The fact that I now quote "quizzing-as-philosophy" amply illustrates that.

Mahaquizzer 2008 - Report

Organised by: KQA
Conducted in Pune by: Vishwajeet Narvekar (many thanks!)

School Winner: nandan Gokhale - Fergusson College (24)
College Winner: saransh Verma - Sinhgadh College of Engineering (27)
Ladies Winner: maitreyi Gupta - Vishwakarma Institute of Technology (29)*
Open Category Winner: J. ramanand (68)

* maitreyi also had the highest score by a college student, but the Ladies and College prizes were awarded separately

Number of participants: 32 (a little disappointing because some of the registered participants did not show up. Unluckily, we also did have about 6-8 people out of town.)
Official Final standings will be out soon.

Mahaquizzer 2008

The KQA's annual solo quizzing championship Mahaquizzer will also be held in Pune, along with 8 other cities. The Pune details can be seen here, while click here for the official homepage.

Boiled Beans - Beware of Geeks bearing gifts

If you haven't already heard of Boiled Beans, I recommend it highly. It's a quizzing site (Indian) that features questions on science and technology, and the content is such that even non-geeks should find it interesting.

May Open Morning Quiz - "Dekho Magar Pyaar Se"

Date: May 4, 2008
Set and Conducted by Niranjan Pedanekar

Results (elims scores in bracket):
1st: Harish + Ramanand (D): 215 [25.5]
2nd: Akhil + Apurva (C) : 210 [20.5]
Jt. 3rd: Salil + Yasho (B) : 160 [24]
Jt. 4rd: Aditya Gadre + Kaustubh (E) :160 [21]
5th: Abhishek + S. Ashwin (F) : 145 [19.5]
6th: Aniket + Manish Manke (A): 105 [20]

Best school team: Pushkar Pandit and Kunal Kalkundri; Best college team not in final: Rohan and Gaurav Singh, Best newbies: Harshal Modi and Mahip Vyas

Scorer: Aadinath Harihar

Report

This report is easy to describe: the quiz was brilliant :-). After having inflicted brain-churning quizzes in the last couple of years, Niranjan chose to rebel against the monsters he had unleashed, as well as the verbose laziness of the rest of us. He presented a quiz whose underlying theme was 'pithiness' which showed that questions can be set with an economy of expression by exploiting the proverbial '1 pic == 1000 words. In doing so, he has again pushed the boundaries of what we can do in setting a quiz. At the same time he was also able to show us what we can do 'at a quiz' - in presentation, in building atmosphere, in panache and chutzpah (Yiddish for ... :-))

The quiz began with a Larry Lessig/Dick Hardt style presentation which so caught everyone's fancy that there was actually an encore demanded and had. The elims set the standard with some excellent questions.

Most felt that the finals were a lot less mentally taxing than previous quizzes, which seemed to naturally flow from the theme of the quiz. There were 4 regular rounds and 4 'special rounds'. Though interesting, I felt some of them had too many questions. Another observation was that since we spent less time in parsing each question, we had a little more time to ponder the possible answers.

As ever, Niranjan's choosing of question elements was almost always excellent. While setting a question, there are several different ways of presenting it. This is especially so in a visuals only quiz, where one would have been faced with questions such as what to show, whether there are enough hints within the images (remember: want to have as few words in the question as possible), whether this is a good enough question, and so on. For me, observing these possible choices was the best part of the quiz. For instance, the question about the index from a particular book - I don't know if other pages would have been as revealing as that particular page.

Lest I wax too eloquent, here are some minor flaws: the quiz was at least 30 minutes too long. There were quite a few Rosa Park-ers (perhaps our new term for 'sitters' ;-)) which, much to the chagrin of Teams F & E, kept coming to us. (Team F were perhaps so distraught that when presented with their own sitter, they chose to slip rather inconveniently :-).)

Further on the plus side, the proceedings on stage were very peaceful and conducive to quiet contemplation of quizzes. We had a large turnout of school quizzers this time. Harish and I finally won (together, that is) a quiz of Niranjan's, having come close twice before. Akhil and Apurva, fine but underrated quizzers, gave us a good fright with their late surge.

It was an enjoyable way to spend a Sunday morning.

Brain Damage - May Open Quiz

Set and Conducted by Abhishek Nagaraj and Aditya Gadre

Results:

1st: J Ramanand , BV Harish Kumar , Kaustubh Bhat :100 pts
2nd: Niran Pedanekar , Yasho Tamaskar and Vasu Ramanujan : 75
Jt 3rd: Meghashyam Shirodkar , Samrat Sengupta , Aniket Khasgiwale :70
Jt 3rd: Salil Bijur , Nndan Gokhale and Manish Manke :70
5th: Apoorva , Akhil and Sanyukta : 50
6th: Kapeesh Saraf , Venkat S , Maitreyi Gupta : 35

Some thoughts about the quiz:

-Turnout was rather disappointing. Only 25 teams showed up.
-This quiz was not a junta-friendly quiz. While we agree the elims were very difficult, they were workable and not obscure.The low cut off was expected.
-The newbie quiz was particularly added with the intention that not-so-experienced quizzers also have some fun.
-We tried to cover new topics in the finals and also to rediscover some of the old facts in new ways.
-We paid no attention whatsoever to the balance of the quiz and did not make question with any topic in mind. We just concentrated on framing good questions which screwed up the balance and it turned out to be a very Brit-heavy quiz.
-In retrospect , we should have had some questions on music given the theme of the quiz.Maybe next time.
-Experimented with a new prize structure .Do let us know your thought about it(in the comments section).
-Also experimented with a different version of Infinite rebounds , IR-beta if you may.
-Tried out another new thing ie the draft system for the finals. This was done with the intention of making the elims more meaningful since they were tough and it was a creditable job to crack them.

As to the quiz itself. Team A did brilliantly to win the quiz comfortably. Team F were a tad unlucky to lose out on some questions to team A. There was some great answering from the teams given the difficulty of the finals questions.

So to sum up , we tried a lot of new things in this quiz.
Please post your opinions in the comments section.

Note: We plan to do this quiz elsewhere. So please do not refer to any details of the questions and do not mention any names.

BCQC May Open Quizzing

We're pleased to announce the next set of open quizzes in May. The details:

Date: 4 May, 2008 (Sunday)
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems Limited

Quiz 1: "dekho magar pyaar se" - a Visuals-only quiz
Theme: General, Visuals
Quizmaster: Niranjan Pedanekar
Reporting Time: 9:30 am
Quiz Time: 9:45 am to 12:30 pm
Teams of 2, 6 team finals, no prior registrations needed
Prizes for all finalists, best school/college/newbie teams, audience

Quiz 2: "Brain Damage"
Theme: General
Quizmasters: Abhishek Nagarak, Aditya Gadre
Reporting Time: 2:15 pm
Quiz Time: 2:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Teams of 2, 6 team finals, no prior registrations needed
Prizes:
Winners: Rs. 1500 Landmark GVs
2nd Place : Rs 900 Landmark GVs
3rd Place : Rs 300 Landmark GVs
Prizes for all other finalists as well

Prizes for the Best school/college/all-ladies teams, Best team name prize, and audience goodies.

In addition, there will be a special audience-only quiz (top 3 places get 1 GB pen drives).

Visit http://bcqc.org/may08 for updates

Rotaract Pune Open Quiz 2008

Set and Conducted by Rohan and Karan Jain, Rouhaan, and others.

Results:
1st: B.V.Harish Kumar + J Ramanand (B) : 120 pts
2nd: Pradeep Ramaratnam + Amit Pandeya (D): 110 pts
3rd: Salil Bijur + Venkat S (E): 80 pts
Jt. 4th: Niranjan Pedanekar + Yash Tamaskar : 70 pts
Jt. 4th: Amit Garde + Samrat Sengupta : 70 pts
6th: Akhil + Apoorva : 60 pts

Report (also see comments)

The Rotaract Club of Poona organised the second edition of their Open quiz, once again at the Ladies Club. The weather was a little inhospitable for quizzing, in contrast to the nicely organised event. Participants were well looked after (except for some chip-less munks), which made up for any shortcomings in the actual quiz.

The finals were led by Salil and the Hoosier Cat but they hit a brickwall exactly after the half-way stage. This is when the visitors from Bombay picked up steam to remain in the lead right upto the last five questions. They lost the lead exactly once and unfortunately for them, the quiz ended soon after. There were several imaginative guesses from all the teams, which coupled with some bonhomous banter, meant that no one received any "bhajji" points for noxious behaviour.

The quiz was slightly blighted by a few 'sitters' (like identifying Hitler and Mussolini) and 'chestnuts' (A.G.Bell's attempt at inventing a metal detector). There were more than a few 'identify two people' questions which got a little tiring.

On the positive side, many of the answers were quite audience-friendly. I liked the mostly assured style of the quizmaster (Rohan) who managed to avoid a a major pitfall that many newbie QMs fall into: that of not knowing what to do with partially correct answers. He did this by clearly specifying what he expected as the answers to such questions. (Though, forgetting some of the answers midway took the sheen off his performance :-)). There seemed to be a genuine attempt to ask topics across genres (rock vs hindi films vs india vs geo), which was fairly successful. Finally, there weren't too many complications in the quiz, which helped on the hottest day of the season when energy was at a premium.

BBC Sport Mastermind

Several of my fellow quizzers are massive sports fans with a 'citius altius fortius' complex, so I'm sure they would have wished they could participate in BBC's new "Sport Mastermind". Perhaps we should do a home-made Sport Mastermind at, well, home, just to make them feel better. Though going by precedent, we'll have topics such as World Cup football and World Cup cricket and the racing career of a part-time footballer :-).

IIPM Management Quiz 2008 - Report

Date: 02 April, 2008
Venue: IIPM Tower, ICC Tower
Set by: Students of IIPM, Pune
Conducted by: Meghashyam Shirodkar
Theme: Business and General, College quiz

Quiz Final Results
1st: SIBM
2nd: Symbiosis Law School
3rd: AISSMS
Other Finalists: SIBM-2, ICTM, SCOE

Link: Report in the Indian Express.

Abhimanyu Update

Aditya Bhedasgaonkar blogs charmingly about Abhimanyu. He has a picture there too for you to put faces to names. Here you go.

BCQC March Open - QuiZeitgeist - QM's report

(Also see this report)

A decent turn-out for the quiz (27 teams). Good to see many new faces and some old stalwarts like Amit Garde and Manish Manke. Just like my last year's quiz, the top three spots were decided in the last few questions, it was exciting to watch with top positions changing intermittently.

Amit Garde was in great form, as he with some able support from Aditya and Kaustubh managed to just edge out the other two strong teams marshalled by Ramanand and Niranjan. The other teams also had their moments answering some tough questions.

The audience interaction was enjoyable, with our extra finances resulting in some good prizes for them. Also I noticed that the audience was more enthused by the special rounds, than the normal IR rounds.

Another aspect was that the quiz went off quite peacefully, with no acrimony among the teams or with the quizmaster :), a welcome trend after a few arguments etc in previous quizzes.

One drawback from my side was the intermittent changing of passing order of the questions,it could have been avoided. Also a few questions were perceived as sitters, though there has hardly been any quizzes without sitters, but still as a QM one doesn't feel good about that.It is a fine line actually, because on the other hand no one likes vague and obscure questions.

Thankfully there were no complaints of chestnuts, I am sure if one scrutinizes closely, some question fundaes would have appeared in quizzes before. But if it is not so obvious it is fine with me.

A few thoughts on some of the modifications that were there in this quiz.

1. Three member teams in the finals added to the thrill, as quite a few of the questions especially connects were cracked through teamwork.

2. There was an advantage to the top two teams from the elims who had a two question lead in the finals. This was to make the elims more meaningful, rather than it being treated just as a elimination which should be its secondary purpose, it should be treated as a written round prior to the final. As a written round has the advantage of equal competition.

Srujan 2008

Date: 5th Apr 2008
Venue: Telco Colony, Tata Motors

General Quiz

Set and Conducted by Vinay N.
Format:18 on IR; 6 on D&P; 6 non-passing identify-in-3-clues; 6 on D&P

Results:

1st: Prasann Potdar and Amit Pandeya (D): 80
2nd: Salil Bijur and Nirad Inamdar (C): 70
3rd: Saransh Verma and Karan Chawla (B): 65
4th: Abhishek Nagaraj and Aniket Khasgiwale (A): 55
5th: Aditya Sharma and Anirudh Lamba (F): 40
6th: Sirisha and B.V. Harish Kumar (E): 30

Business Quiz

Set and Conducted by Vinay N.
Format:IR and D&P rounds, a 'betting round' (need clarification on this) and a D&P round connecting to a theme

Results:

1st: Prasann Potdar and Amit Pandeya (D): 100
2nd: Vishal Kelkar and Saurabh Goel (B): 95
3rd: Nikhil Motlag and Ramakrishnan Sridhar (B): 50
4th: Abhishek Nagaraj and Weena (C): 30
Joint 5th: Anubhav Chatterjee and Vijay Krishna C.V. (A): 20
Joint 5th: Yash Tamaskar and Siddharth Cavale (A): 20

BCQC March Open - QuiZeitgeist

Set and Conducted by Samrat Sengupta.

Results:
1st: Amit Garde , Kaustubh Bhat and Aditya Gadre : 94pts
2nd: J Ramanand , Abhishek N , Yasho Tamaskar : 86pts
3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar , Suvajit Chakraborty , Salil Bhargava :82pts
4th: Salil Bijur , Aditya Chandorkar and Yash Marathe :70pts
5th: Aniket Khasgiwale , Kapeesh Saraf , Venkat S : 38 pts
6th: Harsh Ketkar , Saransh Verma , Manish Manke :34 pts

Elims: Ramanand + Yasho , Niranjan + Suvajit (21pts; started with a 16pt advantage), Aniket + Venkat , Aditya + Amit (19.5pts ; started with 8 pt advantage), Yash M + Aditya C , Harsh + Saransh (17pts)
Manish and Salil Bhargava , Salil Bijur and Abhishek N , Kapeesh and Kaustubh were the other 3 teams that qualified and were randomly distributed to the other 6 teams.

Elims were quite simple and did the job of separating the top nine 9 teams from the rest. The finals had 5 rounds. Three were general rounds and 2 were special 'pick your topic' rounds.
Most of the questions were great and Samrat conducted the quiz very well. One of the best things to see at the quiz was the way he did the audience questions. One member of the audience was chosen at random and asked to give a topic on which (s)he would like to be asked questions and Samrat made the questions up there and then and asked them. This made the audience feel a bit more involved and gave a more personal feel to the quiz.
Only cribs about the quiz were the reversal of passing order 4 times in the quiz which lead to skewed number of attempts and a few sitters here and there.

BC March Open: The laME quiz

Date: 30 Mar, 2008
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSL, Pune
Set and Conducted by: Yash Tamaskar, Suvajit Chakraborty
Theme: Entertainment, Music, and a little bit of Literature and Arts

Quiz Final Results
Format: 2 halves of seamless IR, including two theme connects; ~50 questions
1st: Niranjan Pedanekar + J. Ramanand (A)
2nd: Apurva Dubey + Akhil (D)
3rd: Samrat Sengupta + Amit Garde (E)
4th: Salil Bijur + Abhishek Nagaraj (B)
??th: Kaustubh Bhat + Aditya Gadre (F)
??th: Anupam Akolkar + Chintan Shah (C)
Scorers: Aadinath Harihar

Elims standings (out of 40 questions): Niranjan+Ramanand (19.5), Akhil+Apurva (12.5), Anupam+Chintan (12), Samrat+Amit (11.5), Abhishek+Salil (10.5), Aditya+Kaustubh (10)
No. of teams: ~25

Notes:
This is an incomplete report because I don't have all the final scores, and some of the standings may be incorrect. Also, the community had much to say about the quiz on the day, so please use the comments to record them. This way, we'll have the report as well.

BCQC College Quizzer Championship 2008

For the Kunal Sawardekar Prize (the prize is named after the best college quizzer of the previous year; next year it will have the name of this year's winner)

Date: 29 March, 2008
Venue: the Boat Club, COEP, Pune
Set and Conducted by: J. Ramanand (with contributions from Salil Bijur and Anupam Akolkar)
Theme: General, Solo

Quiz Final Results
Format: 2 rounds of 12 dry + 7 audio visuals each; 5 questions in a common play-off format; IR; total: 43 questions
Winner: Yash Marathe - Modern College (A) - 75
2nd: Suvajit Chakraborty (D) - Symbiosis Law School - 65
3rd: Abhishek Nagaraj (C) - COEP - 45
4th: Gaurav Singh (F) - COEP - 30
5th: Aniket Khasgiwale (B) - COEP - 25
6th: Yash Tamaskar (E) - COEP - did not trouble the scorers
Scorer: Maitreyi Gupta

Elims standings (out of 25 questions): Suvajit (14.5), Aniket (14), Abhishek (14), Gaurav (10), both Yash-es (9)
No. of participants: 19

Notes:
Yash Marathe won a quiz that was alive right upto the last question. Suvajit, easily the most prolific winner among college quizzers this season, was leading the quiz going into the last round. However, Yash picked up the first two questions in the round to go into the lead. On the last question, everyone except Abhishek went for the risky double with exactly the same guess which turned out to be wrong, handing Yash the inaugural prize. Cash prizes were given to the winner and runner-up, with all the other finalists getting bookstore coupons.

The quiz itself was very low-scoring. The quiz was designed to be more factual and knowledge-oriented, and represented a slightly unfashionable old style, both content-wise and format-wise. Some of the finalists did not like the questions, while others seemingly did :-).

Quiz setter's note: For my part, the choice and framing of some questions were somewhat dictated by the slight lack of time, and I do not claim that all the questions were perfectly made. Some of them could have been composed better. However, the shift away from 'workability' was intentional, as was the delving into newer areas. For one, quizzing alone makes it harder to 'work out' complicated questions. Furthermore, IMHO, the quiz should try to identify a solo winner who can handle both the tough factual nuts as well as be able to apply their mind to the more 'work it out' ones. Most of the questions were not on slides, were verbally asked, and were only a couple of lines long. Naturally, this invited mixed feelings. More comments and criticisms on this welcome.

Congratulations to Yash on his fine win, and to the other finalists for their good performances.

Abhimanyu 2008

Abhimanyu is the annual intra-COEP solo quizzing event. This year's edition featured eight finalists, was conducted by Niranjan Pedanekar and others, and featured question sets from BC quizzers in and outside the country, making it quite a globalised quiz. A report:

Date: 21 Feb, 2008
Organized by: Aniket Khasgiwale

Eight finalists qualified through a written elims. The final started with a 20 question GK round set by Meghashyam. This was followed by each participant taking questions on a chosen topic of interest. The result was a very tight quiz, which was decided on the very last question of the event.

The Standings (participant, year, score, topic, topic setter)

Winner: Abhishek Nagaraj - BE - (17) - XKCD comics - Kunal Thakar
Runner-Up: Aditya Gadre - TE - (16) - World Cup Football - Yash Marathe
3rd: Kaustubh Bhat (15) - TE - Iron Maiden - Kunal Sawardekar
4th: Yash Tamaskar (14) - TE - The "Yes Minister/Prime Minister" series - Gaurav Sabnis
5th: Mohit Karve(13) - SE - Formula One - Siddharth Dani
6th: Avnish Dhondge - TE - The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov - Kunal Sawardekar
7th: Aditya Bhedasgaonkar - TE - The career of Michael Schumacher - Siddharth Dani
8th: Aadinath Harihar - FE - Tintin comics - Kunal Sawardekar

Since Aditya Gadre had one more point than Abhishek from the GK round, he began the last round knowing exactly how much he needed to win (no one quite knew what to do in case of a tie :-), with a toss up between sharing the prize and giving it to Aditya since he had a better GK - common round - score). It came down to the last question and Gadre missed it, giving Abhishek his much deserved (and much cherished, it seemed) win.

Also see this report by Aditya Bhedasgaonkar.

(In passing, this blogger would like to mention that he has several gripes about the way the event is organised and conducted in general, with how the topics are allotted and how the question sets can be very diverse in content and difficulty levels.)

List of winners
2001 - Rahul Srinivas - Asterix comics
2002 - Sumeet Kulkarni - Formula-One
2003 - Siddharth Natarajan - Archie comics
2005 - Akshay Palve - The Mahabharata
2006 - Gaurav Singh - The Harry Potter series
2007 - Aniket Khasgiwale - World Cup Cricket
2008 - Abhishek Nagaraj - XKCD Comics
(I don't quite remember if the event did not happpen in 2004 - it probably was related to that bad day Chakravyuuh had that year)

Idea Cellular Brand Equity 2008 - Pune zonal round

Date: April 2, 2008

Another entertaining event by Derek O Brien. The finalists on stage (in alphabetical order) were from BMC Software, Honeywell, Infosys, Savoir Faire, TCS, and ZS Associates. Savoir Faire from Goa had been winning the Pune round of BEQ for the last two years and were hot favourites to win again. The team from TCS, Ramanathan and Abha (Did I get the names right?) did well to pip them on the tie-breaker question by answering Roshogollas to "What is K C Das credited with inventing?".

The theme of this year was how quizzing has evolved in India over the years. There were mentions of Siddharth basu and even the cover of Mastermind 5 (but sadly, no mention of the winner of Mastermind 5 who hails from Pune) The rounds and the representation of the scores were also in line with the year that was being commemorated. The highlight for me was to listen to the audio clip of Ameen Sayani hosting the BQC on Radio. Jug and Bunny Suraiya were also present. TCS, the leaders after the first two rounds were presented with two bottles of Kingfisher beer and a chicken each - apparently that's how the prizes were way back in the late 60's. The elims were simple and interesting. Lot of teams felt they missed out on Dollies. The finals consisted of seven rounds. The bottom two teams (ZS Associates and BMC Software) got 'relegated' after the first five rounds. The scoring was 10 points for all correct answers (direct or pass); no infinite (re)bounds format of passing. Some teams did suffer because of the varying level of toughness of questions. After the Buzzer round in which all teams tried to play safe, the third and fourth placed teams (Infosys and Honeywell) were asked to leave.

TCS and Savoir Faire didn't want to take too many risks in the last round and Derek had to pull out couple of extra questions to resolve the tie.

Final scores

TCS: 80
Savoir Faire: 75
Infosys: 30
Honeywell: 25
BMC Software: 25
ZS Associates: 20

BCQC highlights

Abhishek Nagaraj answered the English Lit. question on what are called Gamps after a character Mrs. Gamp in a Dickens story, while Vasu answered the question on who gave his voice to the obituary video of Art Buchwald.

Report by Harish, who was one of the finalists.

"The BCQC College Quizzer of the Year" - a solo quiz

(This announcement is for the college quizzers of Pune)

We'll be conducting a quiz meant exclusively for all Pune college quizzers. Details:

Who can participate: Any (full time) college student from a Pune college. 11th standard onwards.
When: tentatively scheduled for 29th March (Saturday). Time: 9:30 am
What: A general quiz. Written eliminations (30 mins), Finals (~2 hours). This is a solo quiz.
Venue: BC Lawns, COEP

Further logistical details will follow later. The quiz is aimed at encouraging college quizzers in the city, so we aren't inviting entries from outside. Also, the quiz is meant for young student quizzers, so we will not be able to accomodate part-time students or professional quizzers with an identity card :-) At any rate, we don't want to get into all that!

What you need to do if you are eligible and interested:
1. Register by sending me (and only me) your name, your college's name, what you study (leave a comment with your email id and I'll get in touch). Registration is necessary because I will get elims sheets only for those who have. I may get only a couple of extra ones, so anyone appearing on the spot will have to be a little lucky.

2. Let me know if you cannot attend at the given date and time (default assumption is that you can). We may not be able to reschedule except in the most pressing of circumstances because others already have clashing engagements for the afternoon (previously, our preferred slot). If you cannot make it on the 29th, indicate whether you can come on this Sunday (i.e. 23 March) in case we are somehow able to reschedule it so.

Will confirm the details by Sunday.

Announcement - March Open BC Quizzes

The Boat Club Quiz Club is organising two quizzes on Sunday, 30th March 2008. Entry is free.

Venue: Dewang Mehta auditorium, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd., Senapati Bapat Road, Pune-16 (see this link for directions)

Preliminary Details:
Quiz 1: The "LAME" quiz - Entertainment quiz Time: 9.45 am to 12.30 pm; reporting at 9.30 am
Teams of 2, 6 teams in the final.
QMs: Yash Tamaskar and Suvajit Chakraborty

No prior registration.
Prizes for all finalists, as well as for best school, college teams and audience prizes.

Quiz 2: Open General Quiz Time: 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm, reporting at 2:15 pm
Teams of 2, 6 teams in the final.

QMs: Samrat Sengupta
No prior registration needed. Open to all.
Prizes for all finalists; Prizes for best all-school, all-college, and newbie teams as well as for audience

All prizes sponsored by Landmark, Pune

Contact: Email: contact (at) bcqc (dot) org

Keep visiting http://bcqc.org for updates and online quizzes. More details will be posted later.

Prahelika - Quiz at PICT

Set and Conducted by Amit Dandekar

Results:
1st: Abhishek Nagaraj and Aditya Gadre
2nd: Suvajit Chakraborty and Yash Marathe
3rd: Aniket Khasgiwale and Yasho Tamaskar
4th:Rohit Khaladkar and Aditya Kulkarni
5th: Swanand Gadgil and Abhishek Khandelwal
6th: Bharat Marathe and Samir Deshpande

The quiz started with a 40 question ,fairly simple elim. This time however there were no ridiculously easy questions and the elims were quite good . The cut off was 20.

The quiz was quite enjoyable and well set. The main quiz consisted of 60 questions , seamless IR. The quiz had quite a few very easy questions , some chestnuts and some good questions. The quiz setters cannot be blamed for the chestnuts since their effort with making the quiz was apparent. It all evened out in the end so no complaints about the questions as such. They were better than what we see in most college quizzes.

There was a bit of confusion and indecision with regards to part marking for some of the questions , but thankfully it did not affect the result. Next time we hope the QMs take care to decide prior to the quiz which answers they are going to accept and which they are not.

The only major crib about this quiz was the organisation. The elims started at 11am and ended at noon. The final of the quiz started at 4pm. So basically we had to wait doing nothing for 4 hours.