The General Quiz | Infest 2024

Quiz: The General Quiz

Date & Time: 21 Jan, 2024, 3 PM
Venue: Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Pune
Fest: InFest 2024
Format: Prelims+Final
QM(s): Anisha Karnail, Akshay Parale, Charles Mathew

Results:

1. Rajiv Rai, Vibhendu Tewari + Anannya Deb (draft) - 170 (Team 5)

2. Abhinav Dasgupta, Prithwish Datta + Anmol Dhawan (draft) - 155 (Team 3)

3. Joint second - Brajendu Bhaskar, Ranajeet Soman + Pranjal (draft) - 155

Other Finalists:

Debanjan Bose, Bedbyas Datta + Annway Ghosh (draft): 130 (Team 6)
Samrat Sengupta, J Ramanand + Suraj Menon (draft) : 135 (Team 2)
Shashwat Salgaocar, Abid Abdullah + Suvajit Chakraborty(draft): 135 (Team 1)

Report - 

The charge of the yearly general quiz at Infest, the last quiz of the weekend, was given to the youth this year - with Akshay Parale, Anisha Karnail and Charles Mathew setting the quiz. Almost everyone who had come for the fest stayed back for this quiz and the QMs delivered on those expectations.

The prelims were a breezy affair of 25 questions with some excellent fundae, some expected questions, but no run-of-the-mill peters. Although the cut-off for the drafts was 19, there were enough tough questions in the prelims to separate 9 teams without too much fuss. 

The finals started with an interesting written round on people who passed away in 2023, a round which certain visiting quizzers from Mumbai were overjoyed to see. Then there was an infinite rebound passing round, where everyone was more or less bunched up around the same score.

After the second written round with the theme of birds, there was a clamour for leniency on certain answers or additional clues in the questions, but the QMs remained phlegmatic and let the din die on its own. 

The second IR round saw teams taking more risks, with pounces more frequent. Rajiv, Vibhendu and Dada had gone into a healthy if not comfortable lead, with Teams 3 and 4 following closely behind. Some questions might have yielded more points, or at least guesses, if the QMs had added a small clue here and there. But generally, the questions were answered and were interesting enough to hold everyone's attention at the end of 2 full days of quizzing.

Team 5 emerged deserved winners, not getting any negatives on wrong pounces, something which Teams 3 and 4 failed to do and rued together afterwards. 

General hilarity and banter was going on during the quiz, which is characteristic of the laid-back nature of quizzing seen at Infest. The quiz ended within time for everyone to leave without being late, and to leave with a warm, contented glow after spending two days full of food, quizzing, in some cases drinking, and enjoying the temperate climes of Pune in January.

There was plenty of local support and attendance this year, and out-of-town support also continued from across the highway. Hopefully, when Infest 2025 comes along, these will have grown.

Until, then, don't panic, and carry a towel.

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

InFestYouUs 2014-15 - Call for registrations

InFest-You-Us is a mastermind style, specialty themes solo quiz. This year, Infest-you-us will happen next year - on the 3rd of January 2015 , 1:30pm onwards at the Boat Club Lawns in the College of Engineering Pune

The format is as follows:
Each person chooses a topic of their interest. The taker would be asked 10 questions. The taker will be awarded 1 point for getting a question right. If missed, the question would go to the "Mob" i.e. everyone else present. The Mob is not allowed to discuss among themselves, and must decide who among them would go for the answer if the answer given by the participant is wrong. If the chosen one is right, the taker loses 1/2 a point. If not, the confident chosen one will get beaten up by the rest of the Mob.

So if you are interested, this is the course of action:
- Fill up this form ( http://bit.ly/1y9FfB7 )and tell us your name and your topics of choice.Please ensure that all fields are filled in - if we can't contact you, your registration does not exist.
- Then we will find people to make questions for your set for one of your topics of preference.
- Then you show up and we all have fun
- The deadline for registration is 17th November 2014 (We need to give enough time to people to set questions for you)

About the topics ...
- If the largely autocratic BCCI-esque IOC (InFest Organizing Committee) do not think your topic is interesting enough, it will be rejected. The topics must necessarily be not boring / done to death.
- Indicative list of topics that will certainly be rejected are World Cup Cricket, World Cup football, Asterix, Tintin, Friends, Douglas Adams, Big bang theory, Oscars etc
- Interesting topics that have featured before in past editions: English Monarchy, World Chess Championship, History of Israel, Monty Python, Cultural references in xkcd, Indian train names, Detectives in fiction, Hindustani Classical music, The War of Kurukshetra, The Discworld series, Indian Women Politicians, Gulzar with Vishal, Islamic conquerors, Indo-Pak wars,
We may also reject your topic if we can't find anyone to set questions for you (So don't ask for something COMPLETELY random )

If you have any queries, mail us at

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.

BCQC InFest Day 1 schedule + InFestYouUs topics

Part I of the BC InFest 2013/14 takes place this coming Sunday (see overall InFest schedule here).

Venue: All quizzes will take place at the Boat Club, College of Engineering Pune.

Schedule:
The schedule for our more-or-less annual more-or-less "Quiz" fest is as follows (more-or-less)

29th December 2013:

11:30 am: We begin the anti-fest with a set of "Auto-biographical" Quizzes, set by some of the BCQC's expats based on their own experiences, travels etc. The quiz will be curated by Samrat Sengupta

12:30 pm: Aniket Khasgiwale will be doing his QI style quiz.

1:45 - 2:30pm: We break for lunch

2:30 pm: We conduct our mastermind style individual specialty themes quiz. We have some great topics, quite a high-profile participant pool and an equally (if not more) high-profile question setter list.

Here is the list of all participants, their topics and question setters.