Wednesday, August 18, 2021

BCQC August Open Quiz 2021 - Let There Be Rock - Report

 

Quiz: Let There Be Rock, the BCQC Rock Music

Date & Time: 8 August 2021, 10 am

Venue: Held over Zoom

Format: Written Quiz | 40 Qs worth 50 points

QMs: Aditya Gadre & Navin Rajaram

In 1977, AC/DC proclaimed ‘Let There Be Rock’. Cut to 44 years later in pandemic times, our QMs thought it was best to follow the sermon and rock it out at 10 in the morning on a Sunday. Yes, please! Hundred-and-twenty individuals also seemed to be in agreement, as we saw incredible participation of 60 teams. Thank you, everyone!

A written quiz ensures all teams get to have a crack at every question, with no one going home (err, yeah) feeling left out and suffering the wrath of a prelims. And, what better than hearing good music all the way through! And, it’s here where the best bit about the quiz was - the focus was on music listening. The quiz had a high number of audio and videos, as any good music quiz should be. Given this stress on multimedia, the quiz was also conducted glitch-free and at a leisurely Sunday pace, despite there being Dada’s General Quiz to follow.

Full points also for the research put into the quiz, covering a wide gamut of topics, including genres, film soundtracks, album covers, song origins and band name etyms, music videos, cover versions,  guitar techniques, samples and inspirations and a lot more.

The quiz was dotted with a bunch of quirky tidbits – ranging from naming a 60s band from Liverpool (not the Beatles! Hint: Liverpool FC) to identifying Grace Slick from her paintings (question showed images from Alice in Wonderland as drawn by the Jefferson Airplane vocalist) to naming Wish You Were Here based on a clue that the LP sleeve was packed to trap the smell of burning human flesh! However, the unanimous decision on the best question of the quiz was probably Anu Malik sir taking ‘inspiration’ from KISS’ I Was Made For Loving You Baby ft. Sallu bhai.

The bulk of the questions seemed to border around classic and hard rock from the 60s and 70s (perhaps QM bias?). Higher representation from the so-called modern eras and other genres of rock music could have possibly made it a more well-rounded quiz. Music from this century also only made few isolated appearances. To talk about a pet peeve, the count of three questions on Indian rock, a goldmine that it is, could perhaps have been slightly more. Incidentally, two of those were from the post-2000s era!

That said, kudos to the QMs for keeping the quiz accessible and interesting with a heady mix of core funda and workoutables. The quiz mostly concentrated on all the big names and famous songs – from Led Zep to Alanis Morissette to Hendrix to Elvis to RHCP to GnR to Van Halen’s Eruption to Who’s Tommy to Zero’s PSP12 to Heart’s Barracuda, to name a few.

A special mention to #SoccerKils (Udupa & Santosh). Fact that they won the quiz isn’t why we’re writing about them, but the margin by which they pulled it off is astounding. They completely maxed the quiz with a phenomenal score of 49/50. One question had to be cancelled due to a Zoomcommentboxgate. The next best score was 43 and then a bunch of teams clubbed in the 38-37 range.

To reiterate, great music was always at the forefront of this quiz. As a parting gift, our generous QMs actually created a Spotify playlist featuring every song that found its mention in the quiz, resulting in 4 hours of rockgasm. Give it a listen! Playlist follows the report.

I heard it through the grapevine that the QMs are planning further editions of this quiz and if the first one is anything to go by, it’s most noble a decision.

P.S: The lack of any funda on The Beatles in a rock music quiz was taken up by the diarist and amicably settled in an out-of-court settlement with the quiz-setters. Pfft.

Clickhere for the playlist.

Scores:

49   #SoccerKills     Thejaswi Udupa     Santosh J.S.

43   Pebble Fans     Nikhil Sonde     Sumant Srivathsan

38   Definitely Maybe     Arijit Sen     Indranath Mukherjee       
       Corrosion of Conformity     Mihir Jayaraman     Nitish Khadiya

37  Fleetwood Macbeth     Gopal Kidao     Srivats Ram
      Bridge over Roger Waters     Sethu Madhavan     Berty Ashley
      Sultans of Fling     Samyak Chaturvedi     Amrit Visa

35  RajaRam Jam/EyeHateGadre     Varun Rajiv     Ashwin Kumar

34  Masters Hammer     Aswath Venkataraman      Rahul Raguram
      In the Annals of History     Bodhisattva Basu     Annway Ghosh

33  Do It Duet     Akash Gupta     Arun TP
      Eleanor Rigby's Revolver     Kunal Roy     Siddhanth Rao
      Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Quizbois     Anisha Karnail     Nandagopal

31  Van Halen T-Shirt     Jamie David Lee Roth Anderson     Angus Eddie Van Halen Creighton
      North Campus Pop Art Experimental Teamup     Arnuv Joshi     Rupak Jain

30  Vowel movement     Sohan     Adi
      Chowder Mookie     Neel Chaudhari     Dhruv Mookerji
     Fossils Fan Club     Arindam Dutta     Debanjan Bose
     Mostly Ordinary     Troy Cumpsty

29  Inglorious quizzards     Samiran Mondal     Joy Bannerjee
      Abhishek     Abhishek Kapoor
     Potentially Hazardous Objects     Paul Hillman

28  The Ozzy Akhtar project     Suraj Menon

27  Rock N'Rolla     Nikhil Soneja     Sandeepan Chaudhuri
      Mohiner Ghoraguli     Abhiroop Dey     Arijit Malakar

26  Greta On Fleek     Sumo     Vikram Rajan
      Polk Salad Annie     Aniruddha Sen Gupta     Srijit Kumar

25  Cohen Cobain Kalidas     Souhardya Pramanik     Agnidev Bandyopadhyay
      GoVansa     Govind Grewal     Vansa David
     Wu Han Clan     Rushabh Menon     Shashwat Salgaocar
     Coffee and Ebony     Sahil Gupta     Pranav Pawar

23  Fortunate Sons     Adit     Prahlad

Report by: Debanjan Bose

Monday, August 09, 2021

BCQC August Open Quiz 2021 - In August Company - Report

Quiz: In August Company (General Quiz) 

Date & Time: 8 August 2021 at 1:30 pm

Venue: Zoom

QM: Anannya Deb 

Scores:

1st: Two Proctors and a Doctor (Dr. Navin Jayakumar, Abhinav Dasgupta, Avinash Mudaliar) - 170 pts

2nd: Peter Panchali Parajito (Debanjan Bose, Sachin Deshpande, Sourjo Sengupta) - 140 pts

3rd: Dream team (Arnabh Sengupta, Anirudh Anilkumar, Shaayak Chatterjee) - 133 pts

4th: Rana Protip (Venky Srinivasan, Kunal Sawardekar, Ranajeet Soman) - 127 pts

5th: East Bengal United (Shouvik Guha, Prithwish Datta, Deepanjan Deb) - 123 pts

6th: Narulkar, Nerulkar, Punekar (Sania Narulkar, Samrat Sengupta, Aditya Gadre) - 120 pts

7th: Remembrance of Things Fast (Navin Rajaram, Manu Sudhakar, Swaminathan Ganesh) - 107 pts

8th: Huey Dewey Louie (Akash Gupta, Arun TP, Zaman Khan) - 103 pts

9th: No Name (Krishnamurthy Ganesh, Rajagopal PS, Ajay Parasuraman) - 83 pts 

10th: Maris Troika (Thejasvi Udupa, Santosh Swaminathan, Ramkey V) - 72 pts 

Report:

Anannya Deb aka Dada has made it a habit of conducting super quizzes in his unique, nonchalant style - and this was no different. 

We started with a written elim which had sparsely worded, crisp questions on a wide range of topics - including topics that Dada unapologetically includes which feature in no other QM's quizzes. The elims were a mix of workoutable and TIL - which is a good way to eliminate in my opinion. Also Good Guy Dada was lenient and decided to take 10 teams into the finals because the bottom two teams were very close to the cut off. 

The finals had 2 written rounds. One on North Eastern Guitarists - one of those topics which no one else will put a question on in their quiz, let alone three. And the other on Olympic posters which teams did better at. 

There were two passing rounds had 18 questions each. The questions were clustered in loosely defined (whimsical) triads across a large variety of topics. Dada managed to make seemingly obscure stuff also interesting and most admirably - covered an insane geographic spread in his quiz - from Africa, to South Asia to South America. This is something that most QMs struggle with and tend to restrict to the US and UK. The quiz also very nicely operated in the intersections of topics - politics and sport, lifestyle and work, stories and history, fauna and folklore - and wasn't really focused on any one topic per se. In that sense the quiz felt truly 'general' and not like it had a preponderance of any pet topics. 

As for the results - the quiz was handsomely won by Team 3 - but at least 5 other teams were in contention for a podium finish till the last few questions. We had some cracking answers and on another positive note - people were on video and seemed to take part in the quiz in the right spirit. 

 

Summary | BCQC's COVID Fundraiser Series

 

 
Over the months of June and July, BCQC conducted a series of quizzes as a fundraiser initiative for COVID relief. In pursuance of the same, four quizzes took place on weekends of these months. To take part in the same, a minimum amount was to be paid by participants to a COVID relief charity of their choice and show receipts for the same. These were conducted over Zoom.

The four quizzes were (click for report):
1. Football Quiz by Ranajeet Soman
2. Food and Drinks Quiz by Krish Ashok, Pranav "Floyd" Joshi, and Aditya Gadre
3. India Quiz by Debanjan Bose and Sachin "Talent" Deshpande
4. General Quiz by Suraj "UNESCO-certified best QM" Menon

With the total participants for all quizzes being above 150+ on average, we are proud of raising more than 2.8 Lakhs via quizzing. Doing something good while doing something one loves is a rare occurrence and at BCQC we did it, and gave everybody an opportunity to do the same.

At this time, we would like to thank everybody: participants, quizmasters, spectators for making this a success.

Keep quizzing, and stay tuned to out social media handles to know of more upcoming quizzes!

Summary by: Omkar Dhakephalkar

COVID Fundraiser Series | Report on the Food and Drinks Quiz

Day, Date: Sunday, 19-6-2020
Quiz: BCQC COVID Fundraiser Series, Food and Drinks Quiz
Venue/Centre: Zoom

Fest/Organized by: BCQC
Flavour: Food and Drinks
QMs: Krish Ashok, Pranav “Floyd” Joshi, Aditya Gadre

Scores:
1. We are like this wonly: Thejaswi Udupa + Anustup Datta at 265
2. Wimwi Manaram: Srinath Bhashyam + Abhishek Kapoor + Vinoo Sanjay at 230
3. Godzilla vs. King Kong vs. Preetham: Navin Rajaram + Preetham + Santosh at 210
4. Coastal Compadres: Anirudh Anilkumar + Arnabh Sengupta + Shaayak Chatterjee at 200
5. Something Something Cauvery: Sachin Deshapnde + Nikhil Sonde + Sumant Srivathsan at 180
6. Meghshyam Shirodkar + Anand Shivshankar at 175
7. The Okay Millennials: Atulya Bharadwaj + Aswath Venkataraman + Aadisht Khanna at 135
8. Khan Daan: Yasho Tamaskar + Rajeev Chakravarthi + Navin Sharma at 125

The Food Quiz was the second installment in the BCQC's Covid relief fundraiser quizzes. Aditya Gadre, Pranav Joshi and Krish Ashok took up the mantle of hosting it. The quiz had been marketed as a general quiz on food which is exactly what it was.

The elims were a breezy affair with most questions having food a connect in some tangential form but the answers themselves required little to no knowledge of it. Answers covered various topics like movies, sports, history, geography and literature.

Predictably the elims were a high scoring affair.

The finals had a bit more food-centric stuff but still managed to balance it with the general side of things due to nicely framed questions and timely verbal hints by the QMs.

Krish Ashok, who has written a well-received book on improving domestic cooking, chimed in periodically with an interesting anecdote or technical/scientific concept explaining the answer. The written rounds also had interesting marriages between food and chemistry and food and music. The competition was neck to neck and until the last few questions especially for the 2nd-3rd-4th places.

Overall, an excellent buffet of topics with snackable questions, whose taste will be remembered in the quizzing circles for years to come.

 

Report by: Ranajeet Soman