Date & Time: 19 July 2021 at 1:30 pm
Venue: A series of tubes (a.k.a the QM's and participants various homes, connected via Zoom)
QM: Suraj Menon
Scores:
Winners: WIMWI Manran (Rajiv Rai, Srinath Bashyam and Aniket Khasgiwale) - 210 pts
Runners Up: Can We Answer Now? (Navin Rajaram, Santosh Swaminathan, Preetham Upadhya) - 195 pts
3rd: Kunal's Nexus (Venkatesh Srinivasan, Ranajeet Soman, Kunal Sawardekar) - 185 pts
4th: Prisoni (Souvik Guha, Prithwish Datta, Nikhil Sonde) - 170 pts
5th: UNESCOVID (Atulaa, Bhargava, Varun) - 165 pts
6th: Matunga Manram - (Balakrishnan S, Rushi Anandan, Vinoo Sanjay) - 150 pts
6th: Vast Deferens (Abhinav, Jayant, Shaswat) - 150 pts
8th: Passing Faiz (Shashank, Abhijit) - 100 pts
Report:
Every so often, India's quizzing scene is riven by talk of the last ever quiz by Suraj Menon. The joy at attending another one of these excellently put-together quizzes soon fades into melancholy that another such will never be experienced, until another such announcement of the last ever Suraj Menon quiz starts the cycle anew. This complex interplay of emotions was in evidence during Sunday's proceedings, only to be undercut by the fact that even the Great Man himself has begun nodding to the finality of these proceedings being somewhat exaggerated.
The quiz began with a 30-question elimination round. A fun, accessible set of questions (the cut-off was 33 out of a possible 39 points) the elims started with a rather timely question on a phrase familiar to Punekars, and tested participants' knowledge of everything from the logistics of operating railway services in the Andes to Telugu remakes of John Landis' oeuvre. WIMWI Manram topped the elims with 34 points and 10 stars.
The finals had 30 questions on IR with 4 written rounds with 3 questions each. 3 of the written rounds were nicely done tributes to the subjects of the previous three quizzes in the BCQC's COVID relief series - Football, Food and India. The fourth written round was on rhyming phrases, another nice touch by the QM. The IR rounds again covered a great breadth of topics - from East African building practices, to botanical appreciation for Sichuanese mercantile innovations, to anchovy fisheries in the Eastern Pacific. Yet it was apparent that effort had been taken to make the questions workable and no question went unanswered by the finalists.
The quiz remained competitive throughout, with WIMWI Manram and Can We Answer Now? trading the lead back and forth through the quiz. Can We Answer Now? pulled 15 points clear of their challengers after the last written round, but WIMWI did some stellar answering in the final stage of the quiz and leveled the score as we went into the very last question. Said question, which asked for an ornithologically named Pune neighborhood (to bookend the Pune questions in the quiz) was answered correctly by WIMWI. Unfortunately, Can We Answer Now? took an aerobridge to nowhere on the pounce and got a -5, thus giving a clear result to the quiz.
In the end, fun was had by all, especially the participants and audience who got to enjoy a great quiz while simultaneously ribbing Suraj gently over his well-publicized aversion to questions regarding particular nominal words and the information contained in the length of blanks. We eagerly await the next last quiz.
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