Friday, January 03, 2014

2013 InFest - Day 1 - Report

Day 1 of BC Infest began with a Saraswati Vandana and the traditional lighting of the lamp. OK, not really, but some bulbs did turn themselves on. As appropriate for an occasional footballer, Samrat gently kicked off proceedings by introducing the BC Infest, and by reading out questions in our newly introduced Autobiographical quiz segment. These featured some interesting questions by Abhishek Nagaraj, Hirak Parikh, Navin Sharma, and Samrat sir himself. Borderline narcissism apart, this gave a great glimpse into the lives of some of these quizzers. We also had a previously-unscheduled set by VCat in which we learned of the many things visible from the Trans-Siberian railway.

This was followed by the QI-style quiz by Aniket: there were no panels, but there was lots of klaxon-ing, lots of bantering, and lots of negatives. The quiz, based on the popular British show QI, had questions with lots of obvious-answers-that-were-wrong, and some obvious-answers-that-were-right-but-left-unanswered-for-fear-of-klaxon.


In a great achievement of self-control, most quizzers returned after the lunch break reasonably on time, to begin this year's InFestYouUs. In all, we had 25 participants with 25 diverse and largely eclectic topics, and a well-behaved mob. The best performances of the day were recorded by Vikram Joshi (9-0, English Monarchy), Rohan Danait (8-1, Iron Maiden), and Sahil Gupta (8-2, Indian Corporates), though comparisons are perhaps not recommended given the wide variety of question formats and difficulty levels.


Going by audience reactions, the most sought after topic session was "NSFW", chosen by Suraj Prabhu and set by Yasho Tamaskar, and the most hilarious one was (this will be a surprise) "Indo-Pak Wars", set by Samrat for Kunal Sawardekar.

With a quick round up of some more QI questions by Aniket, we went our separate ways, to resume the following Sunday with Day 2. BTW, in all, we had about 30-35 attendees. Thanks to everyone who attended, and to those who set questions. See you next week.