BCQC College Quizzer Championship 2009

For the Yash Marathe Prize (the prize is named after the best college quizzer of the previous year!)

Who can participate: Any (full time) college student from a Pune college. 11th standard onwards. Please carry a college identity card if you are not a BCQC regular (we will be polite in case we challenge your presence)

When: tentatively scheduled for 29th March (Sunday). Reporting Time: 1:45 pm 1:15 pm; Prelims begin at 2:00 pm 1:30 pm.

What: A general quiz. Written eliminations (30 mins), 8 qualifiers in the final (~2 hours). This is a solo quiz.

Venue: BC Lawns, COEP

Prizes: for all finalists; also for best first year participant & junior college participant

Registration: On the spot

Contact: Ramanand (9764258560)
The quiz is strictly for college quizzers from Pune, so we aren't inviting entries from outside. Also, the quiz is meant for student quizzers, so we will not be able to accommodate part-time students or professional quizzers with suspicious identity cards!

Last year's report here.

BCQC Open Quizzes - April 5th

The next BCQC Open Quiz Day will be held on April 5th (Sunday). The details:

Date: 5th April (Sunday)
Open for all; no prior registration needed; No entry fees
Two member teams
Prizes for Best School and College Teams

Venue:
Dewang Mehta Auditorium, "Bhageerath",
Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd.,
402, Senapati Bapat Road,
Pune - 411016

(The nearest landmarks: The location is behind Domino's Pizza, near the new ICC Towers complex, Mainland China, the Indiabulls shop. The place is about 2 km from Pune University.)

Quiz 1: Western Movies-Entertainment-Literature-Arts Quiz
Quizmaster: Aditya Gadre
Timing: report at 9:30 am, quiz timings: 9:45 am to 12:45 pm

Quiz 2: General Quiz
Quizmasters: Meghashyam Shirodkar & Aniket Khasgiwale
Timing: report at 2:15 pm, quiz timings: 2:30 pm to 6 pm

Contact:
Phone: Ramanand (97642 58560), Salil (98231 12258)
Email: contact(at)bcqc(dot)org
http://bcqc.org/?q=feb09

Prizes co-sponsored by Landmark, Pune

Why we don't do questions on this blog

A quiz blog that doesn't purvey questions may seem like the story in a Monica Bellucci film: unnecessary. But then quizzing isn't all about the questions, or so we think. There are a number of (good) blogs that provide a regular dose of questions for trivia-vores, but we are not like them. This wasn't a conscious choice to differentiate ourselves from the rest, but truly a reflection of those who run this blog. A few reasons:
1. With Occam's razor held to our throat, we may confess that the simplest reason is laziness. Typing out questions and posting them regularly demands effort, attention, and diligence, which are qualities that automatically disqualify us.
2. We are quizzing geeks and prefer little else to making inane chatter on the peculiar sub-culture of quizzing. Most of this has had a negative contribution to the intellectual progress of mankind, but we're too busy to notice.
3. We are perhaps the first, and (almost) uniquely so, to take our post-quiz tête-à-têtes online. You will see feverish discussions, nay reviews, about quizzes we attend. We think this helps our understanding of this sport that we enjoy so much.
4. A quiz is not a mere summation of its questions, but something that is a mix of the quiz-setter's choices and compositional skills, a function of its teams' abilities and personalities, and the context of its setting. You can't quite tell how a quiz was, just from its questions. As if it is possible to reconstruct an innings by a sequence of runs scored. A quiz is a complex creature, and no quizzer's experience of it is similar to another's. This may sound an overdone examination of a simple hobby, but then you don't have to buy into this.
5. Given our size and history, we have been inclined towards experimentation in formats, presentation, and questions, as well as possessing an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm in writing about views about our infatuation with the sport. Which is why there are essays on formats, on setting quizzes, on analyses, and dil-dehlaadene-waalaa angst.
This post came about because I saw a comment on an earlier post impatiently asking for questions to that quiz. Sorry, you're quite unlikely to get a list of questions for your favourite < insert high paying quiz name> quiz here. You will have better chances elsewhere. So why bother reading this blog? We didn't say you had to bother. Even some of us don't.

Tata Crucible 2009 - Pune results

This report from the official site tells us that SCMHRD's Gaurav Parab and Amneet Sodhi won a tight contest, with Symbiosis Law (Subhodeep Jash & Suvajit Chakraborthy) finishing second. Well done to the winners!

BCQC – January and February 2009 newsletters

Obligatory Question: If you were wearing the 'mustard & tomato', what would you be?

The first two months of 2009 were so frenetic that there was hardly any time to put a newsletter together. Here's how January and February turned out for the Boat Club Quiz Club:

Quizzes

The January BCQC Open Quiz Day saw two general quizzes, one by Pradeep Ramarathnam of the BQC and the other by Suvajit Chakraborty and Yash Marathe, both leading college quizzers from Pune. Local colleges VIT (Quiz-o-Mania), AFMC (Shyam Bhatt Memorial Quiz), Fergusson College (Inquizzition 8), and MIT (Axlerate) held their annual general quizzes in these two months.

AFMC also held several theme quizzes as part of their annual fest, as did Symbiosis Law, who also had a general quiz called Jigyasa (a quiz that was set and conducted by the BCQC).

Clearly, this packed quizzing season saw an abundance of themed quizzes, with sports quizzes at Sinhgadh College of Engineering and COEP. But the most novel of them was Quiztronomy, an Astronomy quiz for students that was held as part of the COEP Astronomy Club's effort to mark the International Year of Astronomy. The response was very good and the members have promised to be back next year as well.

The biggest quiz of the season in these parts was the Landmark quiz in Pune, which had several new elements to it this year. If you missed out, there's going to be one in Mumbai on the 1st of May.

There were several BC sessions, with a Requiem for a Theme English Music quiz by Aditya Gadre, and contributions by Yash Tamaskar, among others.

Upcoming Quizzes in March-April

The next BCQC Open Quiz day will feature a Western Music-Entertainment-Literature-Arts (MELA) quiz by Aditya Gadre and a General Quiz by Meghashyam Shirodkar and Aniket Khasgiwale. This quiz will probably be held towards the end of March or beginning of April, so if you have exams or any preferences, you should write in to me.

We also plan to have an open quiz for first year students of local undergraduate colleges, as well as the (already dreaded) BCQC College Quizzer Championship that began last year.

Requiem for a Theme at the BC will feature a unique medicine quiz sometime in the next four weeks.

I've started so I'll finish

* 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, or write to us.

* Finally, we leave you with this interesting story from the UK surrounding Gail Trimble on this year's University Challenge quiz show who was dubbed the Greatest UC contestant ever and provoked a lot of comment about her looks and her brains. (Link thanks to Harish).

Answer to Oblig Question: A member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (their club colours)

Previous BCQC newsletters here.

Sports Mania - Sports Quiz at Exelcior , SCOE

Set and Conducted by Rohit Bahulekar
Results:
1st: Aditya Gadre and Yash Marathe : 145 pts
2nd: Suvajit Chakraborty and Rohit Chandrachud : 85 pts
3rd: Yasho TAmaskar and Gaurav Singh : 70 pts
4th: Kunal Pungaliya and Sudharma Bapat: 45 pts
5th: Bharat Marathe and Sameer : 30 pts
6th :Anirban and Sarat : 25 pts

Report
The quiz had a nice elims . Highest score of 17/25 with cutoff of about 10/25. Good spread of topics covered. Finals had some very good fundae . Some questions were peters and some had wierd answers which led to few arguments. There were quite a few questions and a lot of sports covered. The theme was pretty good and easily gettable.

Axlerate - Open quiz at MIT

Set and conducted by Karan Pande Pandav and Rohan Jain
Results:
1st: Aditya Gadre and Suvajit Chakraborty : 120 pts
2nd: Aniket Khasgiwale and Yasho Tamaskar : 80 pts
Jt 3rd: Keyur Munot and Jaipal : 50 pts
Jt 3rd: Siddharth Cavale and Nikhil Motlag : 50 pts
5th: Kunal Pungaliya and Sudharma Bapat : 30 pts
6th : Aditya Pawar and Karan Mann : 10 pts

Report
A rather business heavy general quiz . Most of the questions were good. Elims were very nice though a few questions could have been framed better. Finals were pretty good , but then had too much vulgarity (with questions on Viagra, flavoured condoms, Erotic novels , books with naked photographs ) for my tastes. One crib about the quiz was that the QMs hadn't decided on what answers they were going to accept (whether to give points for funda or not). One good question had to be scrapped and another two led to a few arguments.

Other than that a decent effort from the QMs.

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Report by Aditya Gadre