BCQC September Open - The Ajai Ragde Memorial History-Geography Quiz - Report

 Quiz: The Ajai Ragde Memorial History-Geography Quiz

Date & Time: 12 September 2021

Venue: Held over Zoom

Format: Elims + Finals

QMs: Kunal Sawardekar and Omkar Dhakephalkar

Results:

1^st: WIMWI Manaram: Rajiv Rai, Srinath B, Vinoo S at 274
2^nd: Vetes Vulpes: Tathagata Chatterjee, Archana Gupta, Ninad Sapute at 21
3^rd: ROTF: Navin, Swami, Manu at 204
4^th: Trevlling Kilroy: Anurakshat Gupta, Anirudh Anilkumar, Arnabh Sengupta at 201
5^th: Aila Jumbo: Ravi Mundoli, Ashwin Kumar, Samanth
6^th: Hammer and Tongs: Shouvik Guha, Anannya Deb, Jayashree Jayakar Mohanka at 182
7^th: QuizElite: Abhinav Dixit, Sushmita Sharma, Adarsh Dixit at 97
8^th: Three’s Company: Keshav, Ajay, Debashree at 58

A History Geography Quiz is an apt way to pay tribute to an esteemed member of the community and Mr Ajai Ragde was definitely one. I remember quizzing with him in BCQC Opens and by virtue of the draft system used in the finals, has couple of times even teamed up with him. History geography politics were his thing and he would stoically sit through the usual pop culture shit that youth quizzers of today revel in. In his mind, he must have been lamenting, purvicha Pune quizzes rahile nahin.

The responsibility of setting and conducting the quiz was entrusted in the able shoulders of messieurs Kunal ‘Psaw’ Sawardekar and Omkar ‘Dhake’ Dhakephalkar. Both have a strong record in setting good enjoyable quizzes and this latest specimen was no less.

To start with, we had a 30-question prelims with answers to be filled up in a Google Form, as has become a common practice in the era of Zoom quizzes. The questions were compact and pithy and led to very precise answers. Of course, some participants still debated with the QMs on the validity of their guesses, throwing Wikipedia entries as citation. The QMs very efficiently handled the situation and carried on. The cut off for the finalists was 24 and I was one of the top 8, having in typical Pune style, done a deal by teaming up with MahaQuizzers Shouvik Guha and Jayshree Mohanka.

Moving to the finals, we had 32 questions on the pass with 3 sets of 4 written questions, each set on a certain theme. The first one was on colonial flags where the flash usually had some elements of the European power and an element referencing the colony. The second one was on panhandles The third set was on paleogeography.

The main set of 32 questions was on infinite bounds using the Arnold Variation. The QM, Psaw, correctly admonished an impertinent query on whether it should be called the Bangalore IR format. In addition there was pounce, of course, naturally, since it’s a Pune invention

The questions were super. My favourite was the reasons why there was a precise record of the date and time of a cataclysmic event in one part of the world (because of records kept about a very specific orphan tsunami in another part of the world).

The quiz was won by WIMWI Manram, the super group team of Vinoo Sanjay, Rajiv Rai and Srinath Bashyam. The finals started with 8 teams and ended with 6, a bit like in a long-distance race. That's one of the banes of the online quiz era. A normal which would have taken 2-3 hours offline now take 5-6 hours. Teams take ages to discuss on their team group chats and if they want to pounce they ask for time saying network issues.

Overall, an excellent quiz covering all continents and all eras from paleolithic era to modern day. We shall, hopefully, come back next year when this becomes an annual event in the BCQC calendar.

Report by: Anannya “Dada” Deb