A history of the BC quiz club - IV

The story of the BC quiz club continues, but this time by Vishal Dalal

This takes over from Shrirang's third article on the Boat Club Quiz . Most of it rings very true except the part on me being rotund. Vishal Dalal = George Thomas * 2 is taking things a bit too far. 1.5 is more like it.

Shrirang , Maya and Aniruddha left the Pune quizzing scene in 1995 to Pune quizzing's infinite loss - Shrirang to IIM Bangalore , Maya to IIT Powai and Aniruddha to Penn State for his PhD . I still remember Aniruddha (Ana for convenience) receiving news of his acceptance to Penn State in the midst of a "bakaayda" Saturday quiz. After he finished jumping up and down we managed to get the quiz back on track . He paid for the bhajjis and the Pepsi that afternoon.

What COEP did have in Mid-1995 was a regular Saturday quiz and a strong stream of emerging quizzers from SE and TE in additon to the veterans from BE. George Thomas , Kunal Vaed and Sanjeev Chandran (Sancho) from FE/SE were regulars. Maya's quizzing genes manifested themselves in her younger brother Akshaya from TE . Anand Aravindan joined me and Akshaya and voila - we had two serious teams fully primed for competition !!

We did not lose any quiz that year.

Insynch , Verve (COEP's first home quiz sponsored by Indian express - more on that later), Shyam Bhatt and the BJMC quiz all fell under a determined assault from COEP (sounds very heroic no ?). More importantly , attendance at the Saturday quizzes went up significantly - even the E&TC guys started attending !!!

We also finally got our own quiz - Verve had it's inaugural run that year after Indian Express decided to see things our way. It was a smashing success - we beat AFMC to second place and Fergie to third. To me however , quizzing as an exrecise in marketing will have been truly successfully only when we get the canteen to sponsor Bhajjis and cold drinks for the Saturday quizzes :-))) Any chance of this happening ?

I went off to IIM Calcutta at the end of the year . Yahaan pe quizzing took place at a very different level - very cut-throat, very intense , full of drama. Relationships were made and broken on the basis of quizzes. I swear guys , I actually saw a guy and a girl who were on different teams fight and break up after a quiz. I also appeared on my first (and last) Bengali quiz on Doordarshan Calcutta. This was based on the life of Rabindranath Tagore. The invited teams were us , Presidency College and ViswaBharati (Shantiniketan). Needless to say Shantiniketan thrashed us black and blue. I remember stealthily removing my IIM Calcutta sweatshirt and slinking away after the recording.

Our "Puneri" team from IIM Calcutta (me and Amit Joshi - a classy quizzer from COET) managed one last hurrah. We took the Presidency College annual quiz right from under the noses of our hosts. I then spent the rest of my time at IIM repairing my grades and bruised ego. So that was that - the end of my short lived quizzing career

In subsequent years Akshaya and Sancho went off to IIM Ahmedabad - not much of a quizzing City. Shrirang and I did meet subsequently and we along with another George Thomas wannabe (weight-wise) called S J Prasanth managed to regularize quizzing at Infy - more on this in another article.

It would be great to have another re-union style quiz with the old guard (Shrirang , Maya , Akshaya , George , Aniruddha , Niranjan , Arun Pillai , Kunal Vaed , Sancho , Anand Aravindan et al) at the Boat Club. Anyone in touch with the guys mentioned above are requested to ask them to contact me/Shrirang

As always , I'll do the questions.

:: Vishal Dalal