Venue: St. Andrews Auditorium, St. Andrews College, Mumbai
Conducted by: Dr. Navin Jayakumar
Turnout: ~170 teams
Results
1st: Alagarsamy, J. Krishnamurthy, Jayakanthan: E (105)
2nd: Pradeep, Mukund, Nitish: D (65)
3rd: Sumant, Rajiv, Vibhendu: C (55+tiebreak)
4th: Vikram, Rishi, Hanisha: G (55)
5th: Souvik, Govind, Dhananjay : H (45)
Jt. 6th: Dipan, Arnab, Arka: A (40)
Jt. 6th: Suraj, Salil, Aditya G: F (40)
8th: Meghashyam, Amit G, Anand S: B (25)
Cutoff seems to be 31.5 on 40
Best Corporate Team: TIFR
Best College Team: IIT Bombay
Best School Teams: 1st: Dhirubhai Ambani Intl. School; 2nd: BJEM School
Best Team Name: 'Pigs Fly, Swine Flu'
Report
Perhaps not making it to the final of a quiz is a better way of enjoying it. This blogger found the first Bombay Landmark quiz more favourable than the corresponding Pune fixture earlier this year. There were a couple of peeves as usual, but more on that later.
There is almost no margin for error in these kinds of elims (as we would soon realise): the questions are biased towards being 'all-quizzer-friendly', which meant that once again, they were significantly based on events currently in the news or of immediate local interest, and the cut-offs were very high. The selection of questions & their framing were quite good, in the balance.
The finals had several interesting questions, and a couple of the teams gave some outstanding answers. There weren't any obvious 'recent repeats' this time, though there were a few easy ones that hardly had more than one viable options to guess.
The preference for items very recently in the news was clear, and it could partly be because of the excessive load of setting 3 full-size quizzes in about 8 months (with 2 more to go on Aug 15). This blogger thinks some of the questions could still have had the same impact if asked outside the current time-frame, and wished this preference for current affairs wasn't so prevalent in this quiz. Some of the India-related questions were good.
The theme, though mercifully better than the Pune one, was too easy: most teams got it on the 2nd attempt. Like some of us in the audience, they must have been eying the answer after the very first element of the theme. Mixing the theme with questions sometimes results in contrived question making, and could have been avoided. The 'steal' points (just 5) in the first buzzer round seemed to present very little incentive to any one wanting to take a risk early in the quiz.
In summary, the quiz was well-attended and well-conducted. The audience questions were a little sparse and the Playstation round for schoolkids in the middle dragged on for too long. A little less emphasis on just the last couple of months would have been preferable, but the team that won deserved to do so, and did so without really breaking into a sweat.
3 comments:
I agree with Ramanand about the Quiz seeming more interesting from the audience than on stage. Most of the questions were good since we were given just about 10 seconds to think about it, the effort that went into framing the question so as to make it workable was somewhat wasted.
I would have have preferred fewer questions about the last few months , but that's just my opinion. I guess the large number of current affairs questions were there to keep the audience interested and also to reduce the numbers of repeats.
Overall it was a nice experience. And of course we are ecstatic that we actually qualified.
Quizzes like Landmark are essentially populist... and being the first one in Mumbai, you would expect it to be even more so to attract people, especially school children, to future editions.
I thought some of the current affairs questions were nicely framed though, especially the Portuguese Water Dog one..
Just a suggestion..might appear amateurish..If the local quiz clubs conduct the city rounds like BQC for the bombay and Navin conducts the Chennai one and the all India finals then i think the quiz might become the holy grail of the quizzers.
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