Thursday, April 03, 2008

Idea Cellular Brand Equity 2008 - Pune zonal round

Date: April 2, 2008

Another entertaining event by Derek O Brien. The finalists on stage (in alphabetical order) were from BMC Software, Honeywell, Infosys, Savoir Faire, TCS, and ZS Associates. Savoir Faire from Goa had been winning the Pune round of BEQ for the last two years and were hot favourites to win again. The team from TCS, Ramanathan and Abha (Did I get the names right?) did well to pip them on the tie-breaker question by answering Roshogollas to "What is K C Das credited with inventing?".

The theme of this year was how quizzing has evolved in India over the years. There were mentions of Siddharth basu and even the cover of Mastermind 5 (but sadly, no mention of the winner of Mastermind 5 who hails from Pune) The rounds and the representation of the scores were also in line with the year that was being commemorated. The highlight for me was to listen to the audio clip of Ameen Sayani hosting the BQC on Radio. Jug and Bunny Suraiya were also present. TCS, the leaders after the first two rounds were presented with two bottles of Kingfisher beer and a chicken each - apparently that's how the prizes were way back in the late 60's. The elims were simple and interesting. Lot of teams felt they missed out on Dollies. The finals consisted of seven rounds. The bottom two teams (ZS Associates and BMC Software) got 'relegated' after the first five rounds. The scoring was 10 points for all correct answers (direct or pass); no infinite (re)bounds format of passing. Some teams did suffer because of the varying level of toughness of questions. After the Buzzer round in which all teams tried to play safe, the third and fourth placed teams (Infosys and Honeywell) were asked to leave.

TCS and Savoir Faire didn't want to take too many risks in the last round and Derek had to pull out couple of extra questions to resolve the tie.

Final scores

TCS: 80
Savoir Faire: 75
Infosys: 30
Honeywell: 25
BMC Software: 25
ZS Associates: 20

BCQC highlights

Abhishek Nagaraj answered the English Lit. question on what are called Gamps after a character Mrs. Gamp in a Dickens story, while Vasu answered the question on who gave his voice to the obituary video of Art Buchwald.

Report by Harish, who was one of the finalists.

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