BC InFest 2016 - Report

BC InFest 2016 went off quite smoothly and as usual there were some great quizzes and more importantly a lot of laughs and general merriment. Here is what happened: 

(All reports by Aniket Khasgiwale)

Day 1:

InFestYouUs

InFestYouUs 2016 in its shorter avatar saw 22 people take part on topics of their choice (some even took part in topics not of their choice as some people didn't show up)

This time, InFest took place in a room and not on BC lawns which IMO took away from the "mob effect". None-the-less the quizzes were enjoyable - with no set being inordinately difficult or easy skewing the results.  

Kunal justified his military god tag was on target for 7 of his 10 questions on Fighter Aircraft of the Cold War to finish with the top score.

Results (only scores above 5/10)

Kunal Sawardekar (Fighter Aircraft of the Cold War) - 7 points 

Omkar Yarguddi (Sitar in Hinudstani Classical Music) - 6 points

Sampuran Singh (Flags of the World) - 6 points

Pranav Joshi (Life and Times of Alexander the Great) - 5 points

Arnold D'Souza (Eponymous Etymology) - 5 points

Omkar Borate (Indian Badminton) - 5 points 

Days of the Year Quiz by Omkar Dhakephalkar

Omkar finished his highly anticipated "Days of the year" series of quizzes by asking questions on each day of the year from 1st October to 31st December. The quality of questions varied a bit, but to be fair to the QM this was something he had warned us against. Most of the questions were quite good with a lot of good trivia and only a few peters. Omkar also conducted it quite well and the quiz was quite enjoyable on the whole.

Results:

Winners: Suvajit Chakraborty, Rishwin Jackson, K Chakraborty, Uday Bansal

First runners up (tied): Kunal Sawardekar (sub), Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, Snehashish Panda & Kunal Sawardekar, Anurag Danda, Gokul Panigrahi

Day 2

The Samuel Beckett memorial quiz by Aditya Gadre

This was an experimental quiz where all questions were on the secondary claim to fame of famous personalities, hence the tribute to Samuel Beckett who was a First Class cricketer. The presentation of the quiz was also quite good with a grid being used to go through the questions which made it more interesting. Some questions were peters, but that was expected as the theme itself restricted the content available to the QM. The winners were quite appropriately given the Brian May trophy - named after the famous British Astrophysicist.

Results:

Winners (tied): Suvajit Chakraborty, Sumeet Pai, Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, Omkar Yarguddi & Aniket Khasgiwale, Anurag Danda, Robin and Omkar Borate

Autobiographical Quizzes

The Autobiographical quizzes featured 10 questions based on things that the QMs had personally experienced. The QMs for this year's edition included Avaneendra Bhargav, Navin Sharma, Kunal Sawardekar and VCat. Although the mandate mentioned that they ask questions on event in the last year, many QMs went beyond that, asking questions on everything from their birth to their travels

Avaneendra Bhargav: This was the most offbeat of the four sets, featuring  locations such as Ratnagiri and Khandesh along with very local questions as well. Also kudos to Avaneendra for sticking to the theme of things he has experienced in 2015 and not going beyond.

Navin Sharma: This was the quiz where you felt bad about your life as Navin asked questions from his travels ranging from Melbourne to California and covering exotic places like Brazil on the way. Navin unfortunately couldn't make it to InFest to conduct the quiz in person since he was running the Marathon in Mumbai on that day - something which featured in the quiz as well.

Kunal Sawardekar: Kunal's set made no attempt to stick to events from 2015, in fact his set included questions from 5 million years ago as well. But Kunal covered a wide range of topics by including questions on Food, Business, Education and Travel, thus making for a very interesting quiz.

VCat: VCat also went beyond 2015 to make this set with questions predictably featuring Newcastle, China, Malaysia and Hong Kong but disappointingly not featuring Bhubaneshwar or the Trans Siberian railway. The quiz was also unique in two aspects: it was the only quiz where the QM danced after giving out the answer and it was also the only one to feature a multiple choice question, which somehow still passed two teams. As expected, this was a highly entertaining set by BCQC's QM of the year.

Jai Hind Jai Maharashtra by Aniket Khasgiwale:

This was an India quiz with a greater focus on the state of Maharashtra, since the QM felt that the topic was not adequately explored in the usual BCQC quizzes. It started with a written round which checked the participant's awareness about the state of Maharashtra, with most teams doing quite well. This was followed by 42 questions on IR. 4 teams were quite close to each other at the halfway stage before Team 1 pulled away by answering a few Army themed questions and managed to hold on to their lead till the end.

Winners:
Team 1 - Anurag Danda, Omkar Dhakephalkar, Anurakshat Gupta: 126 points

2nd:
Team 5 - Kunal Sawardekar, Vrushabh Gudade, Shantanu G: 96 points

3rd:
Team 3 - Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, Sumeet Pai, Omkar Borate: 95 points

BC InFest 2016 - Schedule announcement

This is the schedule for InFest 2016:

Saturday, January 16th:

10 AM - 1:30 PM: InFestYouUs: the quiz where you take on the mob in your topic of specialty. The participants and topics are as follows: 

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM: Lunch break

2:30 PM - 4:30 PM: A quiz by Omkar Dhakephalkar

Sunday, January 17th:

10 AM - 12 PM: An Unreal Quiz by Aditya Gadre

12 PM - 1 PM: Lunch break

1 PM - 3 PM: The autobiographical quiz. QMs Navin Sharma, VCat, Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav will ask a few questions based on things they have seen or done over the last one year.

3 PM - 5 PM: Jai Hind Jai Maharashtra by Aniket Khasgiwale. An India quiz with a special emphasis on my homeland of Maharashtra.

Other administrivia:

The venue for all quizzes will be the Boat Club at the College of Engineering, Pune.

Teams, if at all, for all quizzes will be made on the spot. All quizzes are open to everyone, so feel free to drop by and attend the quizzes.

In case of any queries, you can reach out to the IOC (InFest Organizing Committee) - Aniket Khasgiwale, Samrat Sengupta and Aditya Gadre by either sending us an email at <thebcqc@gmail.com> or by commenting here