BCQC – March and April 2009 newsletter

Obligatory question: In a list of his favourite Holmes short stories, Arthur Conan Doyle had The Dancing Men at #3, and the Red-Headed League at #2. Which story, from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, did he rate as his best?

Quizzes

The most recent BCQC Open Quiz Day was held in April and consisted of a Western Entertainment quiz by Aditya Gadre and a General quiz by Meghashyam Shirodkar and Aniket Khasgiwale.

The previous week, Aniket had a successful outing at COEP's solo quiz Abhimanyu by becoming the first COEPian to win the title twice. A similar mark was achieved by Yash Marathe who triumphed for the 2nd year in becoming the BCQC's College Quizzer of the Year.

This was also the season of high-profile business quizzing in Pune: the college version of Tata Crucible was won by the SCMHRD pair of Gaurav & Amneet, while Savoir Faire of Goa once again triumphed at the local Brand Equity round. They will participate in the finals to be held on 10th May in Mumbai.

The Landmark Quiz show hit Mumbai for the first ever time, on Maharashtra Day. A couple of teams with Pune affiliations successfully made it to the top 8 beating over 150 teams to the finals.

As ever, there were several BC sessions on weekends: some by visiting BC alumni, some involving new formats. Never been to a BC session before? There's a session this Sunday afternoon at the COEP (directions).

Upcoming Quizzes

* The next BCQC Open Quiz day will be held on the 17th of May, featuring two general quizzes. The details will be announced in a couple of days. As usual, there are lots of prizes: each finalist wins a prize, as do the best college/school/newbie teams.

* India's biggest solo quiz 'Mahaquizzer' will be held on the 24th in several centres, including Pune. Here are all the details for participants in Pune. Do register early! This time, the BCQC will be sponsoring additional prizes for school & college students.

* Tata Motors are organising their annual open general quiz this Saturday: the details can be found here.

Answer to Obligatory Question: The Speckled Band

Previous BCQC newsletters here.

Srujan Open Quiz at Tata Motors, Pune

Date and Time: 9th May 2009, 2PM. Should go on till 4 - 4:30PM
Venue: Conference Hall, Telco Colony. The colony is bang opposite Tata Motors, Pimpri.

2 persons in a team. Age no bar, sex no bar.
6 teams make it to the final.
The quiz is a good ol' gen quiz. Elims-Final format.

Cash prizes for the winners and runners up.
Vinay (9922994677)

More details:

Landmark Quiz 2009 - Bombay

Date: 1 May, 2009
Venue: St. Andrews Auditorium, St. Andrews College, Mumbai
Conducted by: Dr. Navin Jayakumar
Turnout: ~170 teams

Results
1st: Alagarsamy, J. Krishnamurthy, Jayakanthan: E (105)
2nd: Pradeep, Mukund, Nitish: D (65)
3rd: Sumant, Rajiv, Vibhendu: C (55+tiebreak)
4th: Vikram, Rishi, Hanisha: G (55)
5th: Souvik, Govind, Dhananjay : H (45)
Jt. 6th: Dipan, Arnab, Arka: A (40)
Jt. 6th: Suraj, Salil, Aditya G: F (40)
8th: Meghashyam, Amit G, Anand S: B (25)

Cutoff seems to be 31.5 on 40

Best Corporate Team: TIFR
Best College Team: IIT Bombay
Best School Teams: 1st: Dhirubhai Ambani Intl. School; 2nd: BJEM School
Best Team Name: 'Pigs Fly, Swine Flu'

Report
Perhaps not making it to the final of a quiz is a better way of enjoying it. This blogger found the first Bombay Landmark quiz more favourable than the corresponding Pune fixture earlier this year. There were a couple of peeves as usual, but more on that later.

There is almost no margin for error in these kinds of elims (as we would soon realise): the questions are biased towards being 'all-quizzer-friendly', which meant that once again, they were significantly based on events currently in the news or of immediate local interest, and the cut-offs were very high. The selection of questions & their framing were quite good, in the balance.

The finals had several interesting questions, and a couple of the teams gave some outstanding answers. There weren't any obvious 'recent repeats' this time, though there were a few easy ones that hardly had more than one viable options to guess.

The preference for items very recently in the news was clear, and it could partly be because of the excessive load of setting 3 full-size quizzes in about 8 months (with 2 more to go on Aug 15). This blogger thinks some of the questions could still have had the same impact if asked outside the current time-frame, and wished this preference for current affairs wasn't so prevalent in this quiz. Some of the India-related questions were good.

The theme, though mercifully better than the Pune one, was too easy: most teams got it on the 2nd attempt. Like some of us in the audience, they must have been eying the answer after the very first element of the theme. Mixing the theme with questions sometimes results in contrived question making, and could have been avoided. The 'steal' points (just 5) in the first buzzer round seemed to present very little incentive to any one wanting to take a risk early in the quiz.

In summary, the quiz was well-attended and well-conducted. The audience questions were a little sparse and the Playstation round for schoolkids in the middle dragged on for too long. A little less emphasis on just the last couple of months would have been preferable, but the team that won deserved to do so, and did so without really breaking into a sweat.

Brand Equity 2009 - Pune round

Date: 25 Apr, 2009
Conducted by: Derek O'Brien
Venue: Ampitheatre, Ishanya , Pune

Standings
1st: Savoir Faire (E): Rajiv & Harsh
2nd: Cognizant Tech. Solutions (A): Harish & Ramanand
3rd: Kotak (B): Ashit + Samrat
4th: ZS Associates (F): Prasanna & Mihir

5th: QEDbaton (D): Nikhil & Tejas
6th: Mahindra (C): Sanjay & Amol
Report
Savoir Faire once again prevailed in a seemingly tight Brand Equity regional round held in Pune. About 30 teams took part, a far cry from previous years when the R-word was a distant galaxy away. The little venue only underscored the current economic climate, but surprisingly turned out to be a compact little place with enough atmosphere for a quiz.

The questions themselves were of the usual BEQ nature: some rank sitters (being asked identify to identify films such as HAHK based merely on a song being played), some strange, hard-to-verify ones ("what does taxod(o?)us mean?") and some good questions ("fans of which brand are associated with the term BrickCon"). The prize-to-question-quality ratio is reminiscent of the economic values of the IPL. This blogger was attending a BEQ event after 4 years and sees that except for the questions becoming even more general in nature, not much had changed.

On the positive side, the quiz master was restrained in his humour and even excellent in repartee and audience-engagement. The "fight against blindness" theme was well-received and made a welcome change from the frivolity of past BEQs.

The national final play out next Sunday at Bombay.

Questions & Answers from the quiz are available at this blog post.

Abhimanyu 2009

Abhimanyu is the annual intra-COEP solo quizzing event. This year's edition featured seven finalists, was conducted by last year's winner Abhishek Nagaraj, with contributions from BC quizzers.

This year's edition was held on 29 March. Seven finalists qualified through a written elims set by Abhishek, consisting of questions under 6 sets of subjects. In the finals, each qualifier attempted 15 questions on a chosen topic of interest. A common GK round followed, once again, with a set of subjects, of which the least scoring one was discarded.

The Standings (participant, topic, topic setter)

Winner: Aniket Khasgiwale - Sherlock Holmes - Ramanand
Runner-Up: Aditya Gadre - Led Zeppelin - Siddharth Dani

Other Finalists:
Kaustubh Bhat - Wimbledon post 1980s - Anand Sivashankar
Nischay - Combat Planes - Kunal Sawardekar
Aditya Bhedasgaonkar - Scrubs - Gaurav Sabnis
Yasho Tamaskar - Batman - Sudarshan Purohit
(Mohit Karve, the 7th participant, was unable to attend the finals)

With this, Aniket becomes the first person to win this intra-COEP event twice.

(Compared to previous edition, this one was well-organised and tried to address many of the problems from previous years, so pats on back for Abhishek)

List of winners
2001 - Rahul Srinivas - Asterix comics
2002 - Sumeet Kulkarni - Formula-One
2003 - Siddharth Natarajan - Archie comics
2005 - Akshay Palve - The Mahabharata
2006 - Gaurav Singh - The Harry Potter series
2007 - Aniket Khasgiwale - World Cup Cricket
2008 - Abhishek Nagaraj - XKCD Comics
2009 - Aniket Khasgiwale - Sherlock Holmes
(I don't quite remember if the event did not happpen in 2004 - it probably was related to that bad day Chakravyuuh had that year)

Landmark Quiz 2009 - Mumbai

Details of the first ever Mumbai Landmark Quiz:

Date: 1st May 2009 (Friday)
Time: 3pm
Venue: St. Andrews auditorium, St. Dominic Rd., Bandra, Mumbai

For registration and more details, pl call Landmark Mumbai at 022-26396010 or mail murali@landmark-tata.com

BCQC April Evening Open Quiz

Set and Conducted by Aniket Khasgiwale & Meghashyam Shirodkar.

Results:
1st: Rajiv Rai, Sumant Srivathsan, Yash Tamaskar (draft) [A]: 145 pts
2nd: Atul Matthew, Abhinav, Suraj Menon (draft) [B]: 105 pts
3rd: Suvajit C, J. Ramanand, Harish Kumar (draft) [E]: 80 pts
Jt. 4th: Anand Sivashankar, Aditya Gadre, Devang Ghia (draft) [F]: 55 pts
Jt. 4th: Amit Varma, Anannya Deb, Niranjan Pedanekar (draft) [C]: 55 pts
6th: Vibhendu Tiwari, Sarat Rao, Ajith Prabhakar :45 pts

Elims: highest: Rajiv+Sumant (22/35); cutoff: 15
Participating Teams: about 40

I was quite disappointed with the (short) quiz and will struggle to think of redeeming features. Perhaps someone can comment about the silver linings. Until then, the clouds:
* Elims were ok, but many questions suffered from being vague in communicating what was expected. This caused problems during correction later. Crisp answers & minimum ambiguity are necessary, especially when people apart from the QMs are correcting.
* More than average number of cricket qns
* A couple of qns in the finals (like the Gulzar) were just bad
* Powerpoint excesses once again, as we groaned again and again about the size of the text in the question. Will lead me to believe they were pasted from a web source, so avoidable, IMO.
* Once again, a case of QMs making questions till the last minute and hence not being able to present a crisp and pleasant interface?

Ok, there were a couple of very nice questions in the finals, which provoked good answers by some of the finalists. The winners led comfortably through out the quiz, and team 2 did very well to come back. But in all, I found the quiz rather uninspiring, and I almost found myself thinking of other things I could have been doing. Wish that were not so.

'And Now for Something Completely Different' - BCQC Open (Morning Quiz) Report

Set and Conducted by Aditya Gadre

Results:
Jt. 1st : Sumant Srivathsan , Rajiv Rai and Sarat Rao : 155 pts
Jt. 1st : Abhishek Nagaraj , Hirak Parikh , Govind Grewal : 155 pts
3rd: J Ramanand , Yasho Tamaskar , Akhil : 105 pts
4th : Amit Varma , Ananya Deb , Vibhendu Tiwari : 95 pts
5th : Niranjan Pednekar , Salil Bijur , Apurva : 80 pts
6th : Devang Ghia , Kaustuv Gupta , Pradeep Ramarathnam : 65 pts

Some thoughts about the quiz:
-This was the first time I tried setting an only MELA quiz. So it was in a sense 'Something Completely Different' .
- Elims turned out to quite low scoring. So most of the teams were very closeon elim score. Amit-Anand and Suraj-Kaustubh missed out on sudden death. Looking at the answer sheets , I feel a lot fo the teams over thought answers and got some simple ones wrong which brought down the elim score. That said , Rajiv and Sumant put in a great performance to top the elims by 4 points.
- Sorry to all for the repeated changes in the finals line up . Especially Suraj And Kaustubh who went from top six to draft picks to just in on sudden death and finally to just out on sudden death.
-As for the finals , Hirak-Abhishek-Gowind and Sumant-Rajiv-Sarat were in inspired form and led pretty much from start to finish.
-The questions themselves were inclined towards factual knowledge because making them workable without making them obvious was proving very difficult for me. Maybe next time I'll give more emphasis on workability. Still I don't think it made the quiz too boring . This is my perception , do correct me if I'm wrong.
-Apologies for some of the sitters and peters.

On another note :
It was nice to see the Bombay teams come in such large numbers for the BCQC opens. It really made the quiz a lot more competitive . Hope to see them for all future BCQC events.

Please post your thoughts in the comments section.

BCQC College Quizzer Championship 2009 Results

For the Yash Marathe Prize (the prize is named after the best college quizzer of the previous year; next year it will have the name of this year's winner)

Date: 29 March, 2009
Venue: the Boat Club, COEP, Pune
Set and Conducted by: J. Ramanand (with contributions from Suraj Menon and others)
Theme: General, Solo

Quiz Final Results
Format: 2 rounds of IR + Special round of top 4 (10 questions in a common play-off format)
Winner: Yash Marathe - Modern College (A) - 130
2nd: Aditya Gadre (E) - COEP - 125
3rd: Gaurav Singh (F) - COEP - 90
4th: Rajeev Galgali (H) - Kalmadi Shamrao Junior College - 40
5th: Yash Sinha (C) - PICT - 35
6th: Aditya Chandorkar (B) - BJMC - 30
7th: Aadinath Harihar (G) - COEP - 25
Joint 8th: Suvajit Chakraborty (D) - Symbiosis Law - 20
Joint 8th: Raghav (I) - Symbiosis Law - 20

Best First Year College Quizzer: C.V.R. Sastry
Best Junior College Quizzer: Rajeev Galgali

Notes:

The quiz started off on a low scoring note with rookie Rajeev, the only junior collegian in the finals leading at 40 after the first IR round. Rajeev didn't score in the second IR round where Yash Marathe and Aditya Gadre made huge gains with Yash at 80 and Aditya at 75.

After the IR rounds, the top 4 (Yash M, Aditya G, Gaurav Singh (at 50) and Rajeev went into a super-final. The format in this round was such that at a time, questions would be asked keeping at least 3 left open and the finalists could choose their question to attempt. A question was closed if it was answered or if there were 4 attempts. 5 questions clockwise and 5 anti-clockwise. Yash and Aditya dominated this round going neck-to-neck. At the end, just like last year, this quiz went upto the last question and Yash Marathe went into history as the first to win a prize named after himself :-).

BCQC College Quizzer Championship 2009

For the Yash Marathe Prize (the prize is named after the best college quizzer of the previous year!)

Who can participate: Any (full time) college student from a Pune college. 11th standard onwards. Please carry a college identity card if you are not a BCQC regular (we will be polite in case we challenge your presence)

When: tentatively scheduled for 29th March (Sunday). Reporting Time: 1:45 pm 1:15 pm; Prelims begin at 2:00 pm 1:30 pm.

What: A general quiz. Written eliminations (30 mins), 8 qualifiers in the final (~2 hours). This is a solo quiz.

Venue: BC Lawns, COEP

Prizes: for all finalists; also for best first year participant & junior college participant

Registration: On the spot

Contact: Ramanand (9764258560)
The quiz is strictly for college quizzers from Pune, so we aren't inviting entries from outside. Also, the quiz is meant for student quizzers, so we will not be able to accommodate part-time students or professional quizzers with suspicious identity cards!

Last year's report here.

BCQC Open Quizzes - April 5th

The next BCQC Open Quiz Day will be held on April 5th (Sunday). The details:

Date: 5th April (Sunday)
Open for all; no prior registration needed; No entry fees
Two member teams
Prizes for Best School and College Teams

Venue:
Dewang Mehta Auditorium, "Bhageerath",
Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd.,
402, Senapati Bapat Road,
Pune - 411016

(The nearest landmarks: The location is behind Domino's Pizza, near the new ICC Towers complex, Mainland China, the Indiabulls shop. The place is about 2 km from Pune University.)

Quiz 1: Western Movies-Entertainment-Literature-Arts Quiz
Quizmaster: Aditya Gadre
Timing: report at 9:30 am, quiz timings: 9:45 am to 12:45 pm

Quiz 2: General Quiz
Quizmasters: Meghashyam Shirodkar & Aniket Khasgiwale
Timing: report at 2:15 pm, quiz timings: 2:30 pm to 6 pm

Contact:
Phone: Ramanand (97642 58560), Salil (98231 12258)
Email: contact(at)bcqc(dot)org
http://bcqc.org/?q=feb09

Prizes co-sponsored by Landmark, Pune

Why we don't do questions on this blog

A quiz blog that doesn't purvey questions may seem like the story in a Monica Bellucci film: unnecessary. But then quizzing isn't all about the questions, or so we think. There are a number of (good) blogs that provide a regular dose of questions for trivia-vores, but we are not like them. This wasn't a conscious choice to differentiate ourselves from the rest, but truly a reflection of those who run this blog. A few reasons:
1. With Occam's razor held to our throat, we may confess that the simplest reason is laziness. Typing out questions and posting them regularly demands effort, attention, and diligence, which are qualities that automatically disqualify us.
2. We are quizzing geeks and prefer little else to making inane chatter on the peculiar sub-culture of quizzing. Most of this has had a negative contribution to the intellectual progress of mankind, but we're too busy to notice.
3. We are perhaps the first, and (almost) uniquely so, to take our post-quiz tête-à-têtes online. You will see feverish discussions, nay reviews, about quizzes we attend. We think this helps our understanding of this sport that we enjoy so much.
4. A quiz is not a mere summation of its questions, but something that is a mix of the quiz-setter's choices and compositional skills, a function of its teams' abilities and personalities, and the context of its setting. You can't quite tell how a quiz was, just from its questions. As if it is possible to reconstruct an innings by a sequence of runs scored. A quiz is a complex creature, and no quizzer's experience of it is similar to another's. This may sound an overdone examination of a simple hobby, but then you don't have to buy into this.
5. Given our size and history, we have been inclined towards experimentation in formats, presentation, and questions, as well as possessing an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm in writing about views about our infatuation with the sport. Which is why there are essays on formats, on setting quizzes, on analyses, and dil-dehlaadene-waalaa angst.
This post came about because I saw a comment on an earlier post impatiently asking for questions to that quiz. Sorry, you're quite unlikely to get a list of questions for your favourite < insert high paying quiz name> quiz here. You will have better chances elsewhere. So why bother reading this blog? We didn't say you had to bother. Even some of us don't.

Tata Crucible 2009 - Pune results

This report from the official site tells us that SCMHRD's Gaurav Parab and Amneet Sodhi won a tight contest, with Symbiosis Law (Subhodeep Jash & Suvajit Chakraborthy) finishing second. Well done to the winners!

BCQC – January and February 2009 newsletters

Obligatory Question: If you were wearing the 'mustard & tomato', what would you be?

The first two months of 2009 were so frenetic that there was hardly any time to put a newsletter together. Here's how January and February turned out for the Boat Club Quiz Club:

Quizzes

The January BCQC Open Quiz Day saw two general quizzes, one by Pradeep Ramarathnam of the BQC and the other by Suvajit Chakraborty and Yash Marathe, both leading college quizzers from Pune. Local colleges VIT (Quiz-o-Mania), AFMC (Shyam Bhatt Memorial Quiz), Fergusson College (Inquizzition 8), and MIT (Axlerate) held their annual general quizzes in these two months.

AFMC also held several theme quizzes as part of their annual fest, as did Symbiosis Law, who also had a general quiz called Jigyasa (a quiz that was set and conducted by the BCQC).

Clearly, this packed quizzing season saw an abundance of themed quizzes, with sports quizzes at Sinhgadh College of Engineering and COEP. But the most novel of them was Quiztronomy, an Astronomy quiz for students that was held as part of the COEP Astronomy Club's effort to mark the International Year of Astronomy. The response was very good and the members have promised to be back next year as well.

The biggest quiz of the season in these parts was the Landmark quiz in Pune, which had several new elements to it this year. If you missed out, there's going to be one in Mumbai on the 1st of May.

There were several BC sessions, with a Requiem for a Theme English Music quiz by Aditya Gadre, and contributions by Yash Tamaskar, among others.

Upcoming Quizzes in March-April

The next BCQC Open Quiz day will feature a Western Music-Entertainment-Literature-Arts (MELA) quiz by Aditya Gadre and a General Quiz by Meghashyam Shirodkar and Aniket Khasgiwale. This quiz will probably be held towards the end of March or beginning of April, so if you have exams or any preferences, you should write in to me.

We also plan to have an open quiz for first year students of local undergraduate colleges, as well as the (already dreaded) BCQC College Quizzer Championship that began last year.

Requiem for a Theme at the BC will feature a unique medicine quiz sometime in the next four weeks.

I've started so I'll finish

* If you are organizing a quiz and want to let people know about it, write into us ("contact"-at-"bcqc.org") with the salient details and we'll put it up on our website.

* We love to hear comments about quizzes, especially those that we do. Use the comments sections on our blog posts to do so, or write to us.

* Finally, we leave you with this interesting story from the UK surrounding Gail Trimble on this year's University Challenge quiz show who was dubbed the Greatest UC contestant ever and provoked a lot of comment about her looks and her brains. (Link thanks to Harish).

Answer to Oblig Question: A member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (their club colours)

Previous BCQC newsletters here.

Sports Mania - Sports Quiz at Exelcior , SCOE

Set and Conducted by Rohit Bahulekar
Results:
1st: Aditya Gadre and Yash Marathe : 145 pts
2nd: Suvajit Chakraborty and Rohit Chandrachud : 85 pts
3rd: Yasho TAmaskar and Gaurav Singh : 70 pts
4th: Kunal Pungaliya and Sudharma Bapat: 45 pts
5th: Bharat Marathe and Sameer : 30 pts
6th :Anirban and Sarat : 25 pts

Report
The quiz had a nice elims . Highest score of 17/25 with cutoff of about 10/25. Good spread of topics covered. Finals had some very good fundae . Some questions were peters and some had wierd answers which led to few arguments. There were quite a few questions and a lot of sports covered. The theme was pretty good and easily gettable.

Axlerate - Open quiz at MIT

Set and conducted by Karan Pande Pandav and Rohan Jain
Results:
1st: Aditya Gadre and Suvajit Chakraborty : 120 pts
2nd: Aniket Khasgiwale and Yasho Tamaskar : 80 pts
Jt 3rd: Keyur Munot and Jaipal : 50 pts
Jt 3rd: Siddharth Cavale and Nikhil Motlag : 50 pts
5th: Kunal Pungaliya and Sudharma Bapat : 30 pts
6th : Aditya Pawar and Karan Mann : 10 pts

Report
A rather business heavy general quiz . Most of the questions were good. Elims were very nice though a few questions could have been framed better. Finals were pretty good , but then had too much vulgarity (with questions on Viagra, flavoured condoms, Erotic novels , books with naked photographs ) for my tastes. One crib about the quiz was that the QMs hadn't decided on what answers they were going to accept (whether to give points for funda or not). One good question had to be scrapped and another two led to a few arguments.

Other than that a decent effort from the QMs.

---

Report by Aditya Gadre

Inquizzition - 8 at Fergusson College

Set by Vivek P., Siddhesh and others from FC Conducted by Vivek P.

Results:
1st: Aditya Gadre and Suvajit Chakraborty : 90 pts
2nd: Yasho Tamaskar and Suraj Menon : 70 pts
3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar and Meghashyam Shirodkar: 55 pts
4th: Yash Marathe and Aditya Chandorkar : 40 pts
4th: Salil Bijur and Kaustubh Bhat : 40 pts
6th: Amit Garde + Hareeth Sridhar : 25 pts

Positives:
-Elims were good.Mostly workable questions
-Finals had good questions
-QM conducted quiz in a very assured manner.
-Effort was obviously honest . NO deliberate peters.
-Some really nice fundaes covered.
-Good organisation.

Negatives:
-Some of the elims questions could have been framed much better .
-The finals were biased towards us 'pop culture' quizzers and other , much better quizzers missed out because of this.
- The last theme round was made a lot more complicated than it actually was and caused much confusion.

Landmark Quiz Pune 2009 - Prelims questions

From the recent Landmark Quiz Pune 2009: Compiled by Yash S (thanks!):

---

1. Full form of SIM? Subscriber Identity Module
2. Which FM has presented 8 full budgets and 2 interim budgets including one on his b’day on 29th Feb, 1986? Morarji Desai
3. Which country does not have a border on the Arabian Sea – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Maldives? Saudi Arabia
4. Which scientific word means ‘un-cuttable’? Atom
5. What was the name of the hero in Vikas Swarup’s Q&A? Ram Mohammad Thomas
6. Which TV show has the highest Nielsen ratings since 2005 and may beat All In The Family’s record of having the highest ratings for 5 years? American Idol
7. Which letters were removed from the name of Asus to give it a higher alphabetical ranking? PEG
8. Which term was coined by Fourier with respect to environmental sciences? Greenhouse Effect
9. Big 3 Carmakers of Japan are Toyota and? Honda, Nissan
10. Symbol designed Martin K. Speckter also known as rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest? Interrobang
11. Which two prime-ministers are alumni of FC College, Pune? P.V. Narsimhan Rao and V.P. Singh
12. Fort in central India having historical significance and derived from cowherd? Gwalior
13. Introductory lines of a book? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Gamboge pigment is extracted by tapping resin from various species of evergreen trees. Where is it from? Cambodia
15. DNA of scientist matched from hair cell and dental records. Used to recreate picture. Visual. Who? Copernicus
16. What is the pouch of a kangaroo called? Marsupiam
17. First England all-rounder to be picked up in the IPL? Dmitri Mascarehnas
18. Who is Daniel Craig voicing in upcoming Tintin movie? Red Rackham
19. Question about type of sari, mixture of silk and zari? Paithani sari
20. Video. Identify singers. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
21. Malay name for southern third of Vietnam same as Indian coastal town. China added as suffix to differentiate from Indian town. Which town? Cochin
22. First person to knock out Mohd. Ali while he was still heavyweight champion? Chuck Wepner.
23. If Jihad means struggle, what means someone who struggles? Mujahideen
24. Quotes about instrument. Sound evokes hundred colours. Which instrument? Sarangi
25. Phrase given by Charles Darwin to explain why some genetic traits are not passed on? Natural Selection
26. Boastful city. Hosted world expo in 1893. Some more facts. Identify? Chicago
27. Name of most popular medicine in the world. What is it used to remove from blood? Cholesterol
28. Bilingual movie about which painter? English title is ‘Colours of Passion’? Raja Ravi Varma
29. Who finished joint 9th in Olympics on basis of number of gold medals won ahead of several countries? Michael Phelps
30. Name of which tribe in the Mahabharata means forest dwellers? Vanaras
31. Which religious ceremonies are ship captains allowed to perform? Baptism and Funeral
32. Which cricketer appointed ambassador for UN AIDS in Nov 2008? Sanath Jayasuriya
33. Complete list Beheaded, Divorced, Beheaded, Died of Fever, Divorced, Beheaded, _________ ? Survived (Wives of Henry VIII)
34. Origin of DC in DC Comics? Detective Comics
35. Who was born here? Visual of The White Elephant café in Edinburgh? Harry Potter
36. Visual. Cover of Amar Chitra Katha. Identify? Tanaji
37. Visual. Connected to 36. Name of pet? Yashwanti
38. Video from Johnny Gaddar. Performer name of Taranjeet Dhillon? Hard Kaur (-ve points to all school children writing Hardcore :P)
39. Video of floating turtle with 3 elephants holding a flat world. Identify? Discworld
40. Ad featuring aliens sucking out gravity. Ad for what? Fevicol

Landmark Pune Quiz 2009 - Report

Date: 21 Feb, 2009
Venue: Ganesh Kala Krida Mandir, Pune
Conducted by: Dr. Navin Jayakumar
Turnout: ~260 teams

Results
(unfortunately, this blogger lost his notes with team info and scores etc, so please add corrections if possible)
1st: Samanth Subramaniam, G. Swaminathan, V.V.Ramanan, ('QED')
2nd: Gopal Kidao, Vinod Ganesh, Rajen Prabhu ('Absolute Bindaas')
3rd: Jayakanthan, J. Krishnamurthy, Diwakar Pingle ('?')
Other finalists: Sumant+Rajiv+Vibhendu ('Travelling Pillsburies'); Pradeep Ramarathnam+Gaurav Grewal+Nitish Khadiya ('Misal Pav-er...'); Niranjan+Ramanand+Avinash ('Amnesia International'); Amit Garde+Anand S+Meghashyam ('Hoist by their own quizzards'); Amit Varma+Ananya Deb+Anil Kothuri ('Jai Santosh Ki Maa')
Cutoff seems to be 29 or 30 on 40

Best Corporate Team: Infosys
Best College Team: BITS Pilani
Best School Teams: 1st: Abhinava Vidyalaya; 2nd: Army Public School
Best Team Name: 'Consortium of Loose, Forward and Quiz-going Women'

Report
It was a new look Pune Landmark Quiz, now in its third year: a bigger venue, a change in quizmaster, and a flood of teams from places outside Maharashtra. The first was because the quiz has seen increased participation each year and threatened to burst out of last time's venue; we've heard all sorts of reasons for the second; the third seems to be because of the introduction of the "national round" (the top 2 teams from 4 landmark quizzes get to face-off in it).

For many of us, it was the first experience of Navin and team, who have received much acclaim in other centres. In terms of questions, it was a great improvement from last year. The prelims were populist, with a significant bias towards contemporary and local questions. Most of the questions were interesting to attempt, though a few of them just came down to a couple of choices to pick from - something which could be a little excruciating.

The final had a fairly simple format: 2*15 rounds of infinite rebounds/bounce/bounds in either direction interspersed with 2 buzzer rounds (16 & 10). QED took an early lead (which they never relinquished) by virtue of picking up the theme (5 questions spread over the quiz) on the very first question. The rounds went by speedily because several questions were answered on the very 1st or 2nd attempt (the ones that weren't usually went all the way to the audience who did nail some good answers).

We had been told to expect a no-unnecessary-frills quiz, which was the case - no gimmicks, and a good mix of content. Perhaps someone and who was in the audience (regular as well as casual quizzer) can provide their point of view as to how they viewed this experience.

Some of the negatives:
There were a few 'repeats' - stuff that is well known in the quizzing community. This made some of the directs more valuable than others. The theme was contrived, IMHO, and some of the elements were either lexically connected or tenuous. Also, some parts of the quiz's content seems to be somewhat formulaic (teams seemed to expect certain types of local questions and contemporary events ), thus making it vulnerable to prior preparation. This is not to diss any of the teams that took advantage of this (they were also better in other respects), but I wish the setters would find a way to make the quiz more unpredictable, even while staying within the self-stated constraint of keeping it friendly even for the lay quizzer.

A minor point was that the usual tradition of introducing the teams on-stage was omitted. Also, wonder if there could have been two projection screens instead of one, because it was a little difficult to see the screens from the corners.

On the positives: the quiz was well-conducted, and the organisation was better than last time. Another omission was welcomed (particularly by me!) - that of choosing the "Best Quizzer". The process of doing so never seemed fair or interesting to me, so we were spared all that.

Back to the results: QED were deserving winners with some fine answers, but it was a tight race among the rest of the teams. Many thanks to Landmark, especially the industrious organisers from the Pune store. The Landmark Quiz now moves on to Mumbai for the first ever such quiz there, to be held on the 1st of May.

Postscript: This blog certainly seems to have raised the profile of the word "Interrobang" in the Indian quizzing community. The question has become a frequent visitor in quizzes (especially Pune-related ones), with sightings in two BCQC Open quizzes (this one and that), at KQA's ASKQANCE last year, and now at this Landmark quiz. It is perhaps time to retire the question, because if I see the name Martin Speckter once more at a quiz, I shall scream :-). This has also fueled a great deal of personal interest in Mr. Speckter, for he has become reduced to a single claim to fame in these parts! (read why the name was chosen for this blog.)

Inquizzition - 8 - Quiz this Sunday

What: Inquizzition 8, Fergusson College, Pune
Where: Amphitheatre, Fergusson College, Pune
When: Sunday, 22 February, 11 am
Flavour: Open general quiz
Details: Teams of 2, registration free and on the spot
Contact: Nihar 90110-61474, Siddesh 99606-12098, Gaurav 98605-84841

Jigyasa - General quiz at Symbhav 2009

Set by : J Ramanand and Suraj Menon

Conducted by : Suraj Menon

Results:
1st: Yash MArathe and Yasho Tamaskar : 100 pts
2nd: Suvajit Chakraborty and Aditya Gadre: 95 pts
3rd: Subhodeep Jash and Srideep: 50 pts
4th : Maitreyi Gupta and Rohit Khaladkar : 35 pts
5th : Yash Sinha and Amit Dandekar : 30 pts
6th: Karan Chawla and Saransh Verma: 20 pts

The quiz started with an excellent 30 question elims. Great workable questions. One minor crib with the elims were the slightly tougher a.k.a. Quizzer friendly questions due to which there was a low cut-off which in turn led to a mass exodus and the quiz had more or less no audience.

The finals consisted of 56 questions seamles IR , one long connect and a theme .Some brilliant questions there too. Great range of subjects covered.
It was a tough fight till the end . The Yash's clinched it when they cracked the theme and we didn't .
Suraj added some entertainment value to the quiz with his impressions of certain QMs and cries of "Jai Ramanand " whenever any question by JR came up on the screen.

Do post your opinions in the comments section.

AFMC Shyam Bhatt Memorial quiz 2009

Set and conducted by : Major Anish

Results :
1st: J Ramanand and Aditya Gadre: 130 pts
2nd: Suraj Menon and Yasho Tamaskar : 75 pts
3rd: Akshad + 1 : 70 pts
4th : Gaurav and Avneet : 30 pts
4th : Manas and sayan : 30 pts
6th: YAsh Marathe and Maitreyi Gupta : 25 pts

The quiz started with a mostly factual 26 question elims.
The finals had 60 dry questions and a special round. The questions were good i the sense that most of them had good fundae , but then most of the questions were completely non-workable which led to the thoughts of what could have been.
A large proportion of the questions covered some very good facts .

Cribs :
-There were quite a few peters and sitters.
-The quiz started very late and went on for a long time. Better organisation definitely called for.

Do post your opinions in the comments section.

BCQC January Open report

Set and Conducted by : Pradeep Ramamrathnam

Results:
1st: Anand Shivshankar , Sumant Srivathsan , Avaneendra Bhargav
2nd: Niranjan Pednekar , Sarat Rao , Vibhendu Tiwari
3rd: Suraj Menon , Aditya Gadre , Nikhil Motlag
Other finalists:
J Ramamnand , Harish Kumar , Shastry ; Yasho Tamaskar , Salil Bijur and Arnab Pal ; Suvajit Chakraborty , Aniket Khasgiwale and Yash Marathe

The quiz started with a long elims with 40 rather tough but very good questions. The highest score was just 21 while the cut off for the six finalists was 13 . The other three teams for draft picks had their cut off as 10. All teams were awarded points in the finals with the formula (elims score) * 2.

The final was filled with brilliant questions , especially on cricket and current affairs. In addition to the standard rounds of IR passing , there was a written round where the QM used diffrential marking i.e. the teams were given points depending on how many other teams got the answer. This round changed the story of the quiz a bit as JR and co , who were doing well upto this stage fell back a bit. Niranjan, Sarat and Vibhendu did very well in this round and made up a lot of ground.

The quiz ended with a Long Visual Connect. It was cracked only by Niranjan , Sarat and Vibhendu.

All in all a long and pleasantly exhausting quiz.

Please do post your opinions in the comments section.

PS: Apologies for the late report. Also I don't have the final scores. Somebody please post them in the comments and I will put the figures into the report.

Quiztronomy 2009 - report

Date: 7 Feb, 2009
Venue: COEP Auditorium
Conducted by: Aadinath Harihar and Mohit Karve
Set by: Members of the COEP Astronomy Club and BCQC
Flavour: Astronomy
Turnout: ~75 teams

Final Results
1st: Yash Marathe (Modern) + Suvajit Chakraborty (Symbiosis Law) (E): 95
2nd: Dawood + Gaurang (IUCAA) (B): 90* (better elims score than C)
3rd: Swapnil + Omkar (SKNCOE) (D): 90
4th: Kaustubh + Karan (COEP) (A): 60
5th: D. Mithilesh + S.P.Gautham (DAV Public School) (E): 50
6th: Sanket + Chaitanya (SIT Lonavla) (F): 10

(Scores thanks to Yash Marathe)

Report
Organised in the International Year of Astronomy, the aim of this first-ever astronomy quiz by the COEP Astronomy Club was to popularise the world of astronomy among students through a quiz that would be interesting even to the non-enthusiast. In this, the quiz was quite a success.

An excellent turnout (though the organisers said they expected even more!) attempted a very interesting set of preliminary questions that were only somewhat blighted in the audio-visual questions by a mix of incorrect and disappearing pictures! The finals saw a mix of participants: a team of Ph.D students, a school team, a team from Lonavala, the usual crop of engineering aspirants, and a suited-booted-lawyer-to-be.

This was my first quiz in the fully-furnished COEP audi with all bells and whistles running, and finally, the college has a comfortable place to hold events in. The organisation was smooth, greased by a large team of volunteers. There was a small solo general quiz during the break between prelims and finals, with winners in four categories (Parents-Teachers, School, Jr. College, and Senior College).

Not that there weren't a few criticisms, largely stemming from some slides being packed dense with text - these could have easily been condensed. But largely, the finals were interesting, and balanced between the demands of a niche topic and the needs of making it appealing. The long connect at the end was quite good as well. A large number of prizes were given away: to schools and to participants (even those who just missed out on qualifying).

The organisers plan to return next year with another edition of this quiz, and it should be well worth looking forward to.

BCQC February 2009 Morning Open Quiz "Gnosolalia" - Report

Date: 2 Feb, 2009
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems Ltd.
Conducted by: Suvajit Chakraborty and Yash Marathe
Flavour: General
Turnout: ~25 teams

Final Results
Joint 1st: Aditya Gadre, J. Ramanand, Rohan Jain (A): 125
Joint 1st: Anand Sivashankar, Sumant Srivatsan, Keyur Munot (B): 125
3rd: Vibhendu Tiwari, Sarat Rao, Atulya (D): 115
4th: Yash Tamaskar, Suraj Menon, Pradeep Ramarathnam (F): 110
5th: Aditya and Abhishek Chandorkar, Aadinath Harihar (E): 75
6th: Aniket Khasgiwale, Salil Bijur, Saransh Verma (C): 60

Scoring: Aditya Bhedasgaonkar

Report
A very competent quiz, the morning open had a mix of some very interesting trivia, quite a few easy ones, and a last round of specialities that didn't receive universal acclaim because of its format. The elims were not taxing, and were reasonably well-pitched even for the not-so regular quizzer (with a couple of nice red-herring questions). There were a couple of questions in the finals that drew applause.

As for the negatives, Suvajit's curious habit of tailing off into silence while reading out a question was observed. The last round consisted of 2 'speciality topics' per team; there were two sets of topics (randomly decided, I think). One of them had to be doubled (no -ves). The catch was that if unanswered on the direct, the question would pass clockwise or the other way depending on which set it belonged to. Teams felt this could lead to a lot of imbalance in attempts and value for answers. Perhaps the QMs could explain what their thinking was here.

Organisationally, no SNAFUs that I can think of, so a good organisational job done by the quiz masters.

Quiz O Mania '09 at VIT

Set and conducted by : Yash Marathe and Maitreyi Gupta

Format : 25 questions elims on ppt followed by 60 questions on seamless IR 10 of which constituted a theme.

Results:
1st : Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre : 170 pts
2nd : Salil Bijur and Suraj Menon : 135 pts
3rd : Niranjan Pednekar and Yasho Tamaskar : 115 pts
4th : Dr. Chandorkar and Aditya Chandorkar : 95 pts
5th : Amit Dandekar and Yash Sinha : 40 pts
6th : Rahul and Ashok : 20 pts

Positives:
- Some really good , workable questions
- Good organisation. No major problems , long waiting periods or other events encroaching on the Quiz (like JAM did last year)
- Reasonably clear policy on part points
- The finger of God didn't show itself.
- Nice accessible theme . Another positive about the theme was that it didn't carry too much weightage and thus didn't affect the outcome of the quiz in any way.
- Prize money and certificates available very easily.

Cribs:
- Elims were very simple and had just 25 questions. Last years elims were brilliant . This time they could have been much better.
- Quite a lot of sitters/peters.
- Slightly uneven distribution of questions both in number and in quality.(For eg: The language questions were very good whereas the sports questions were all very easy for an open quiz)

Overall the quiz was well organised , conducted in a very competent manner and most importantly a lot of fun .

Do leave your opinions in the comments section.

BCQC Open Quiz Day - February 1st

The next BCQC Open Quiz Day will be held on Feb 1st (Sunday). The details:

Date: 1st February (Sunday)
Open for all; no prior registration needed; No entry fees
Two member teams
Prizes for Best School and College Teams

Quiz 1: General Quiz
Quizmasters: Suvajit Chakraborty and Yash Marathe
Timing: report at 9:30 am, quiz timings: 9:45 am to 12:45 pm

Quiz 2: General Quiz
Quizmasters: Pradeep Ramarathnam
Timing: report at 2:15 pm, quiz timings: 2:30 pm to 6 pm

Contact:
Phone: Ramanand (97642 58560), Salil (98231 12258)
Email: contact(at)bcqc(dot)org
http://bcqc.org/?q=feb09

Prizes co-sponsored by Landmark, Pune

Zest Sports Quiz report

Set by :Aditya Gadre with inputs from J Ramanand , BV Harish Kumar ,Abhishek Joshi and PS Sriram . Thanks also to Samrat "Sammy sir " Sengupta for his guidance.

Conducted by : Aditya Gadre

Results (elims score in brackets):
1st : Aniket Khasgiwale and Yash Marathe : 175 pts (24)
2nd : Gaurav Singh and Kaustubh Bhat : 130pts (16)
3rd : Karan Mann and Aditya Pawar : 95 pts (15.5)
4th : Rohits Chandrachud and Bahulekar : 70 pts (19)
5th : Ranajeet and Chinmay : 50 pts (15)
6th : Saransh Verma and Karan Chawla : 20pts (13)

The quiz started 35 question elims which turned out to be a little low scoring.
The finals had three parts: 1st Half (28ques IR), half time entertainment (WAGs round written)and the 2nd Half (28 ques IR , reversed)

Aniket and Yash started as favourites and led from start to finish with some truly awesome answers. Gaurav Singh and Kaustubh had a good start but a late surge from Aditya and Karan kept a bit of uncertainty in the quiz.

Any comments about the quiz are welcome.

Quiztronomy- an astronomy themed quiz.

Quiztronomy- an astronomy themed quiz

Brought to you by The CoEP Astronomy Club- in association with the Boat Club Quiz Club.

The CoEP AstroClub is hosting a one-of-a-kind event on the quizzing calendar. Quiztronomy is an astronomy themed quiz- the trivia being workable for everyone and not aimed specifically at astronomy enthusiasts. The quiz will consist of written prelims, followed by a six team final.

Prizes

• All finalists will receive prizes and certificates; Winners will also receive a trophy each
• The school/college contingent with the best performance will receive a "Best Contingent" trophy.
• This year, we will be awarding prizes worth a total of Rs.10,000/- (inclusive of vouchers)

Details:

• Date: 7th February, 2009 (Saturday)
• Time: 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (reporting time: 9:00 a.m.)
• Venue: Main Auditorium, College of Engineering, Pune – 5
• Flavour: Astronomy- for everyone
• Team: Two members per team; Teammates can be from different classes and cross school/ college

Registrations:

Registrations can be done by email.

Email: quiztronomy@gmail.com

Phone: 9890 777 964 OR 9867 814 536

Required Details:

1. Names and Classes of the participants
2. Contact details (Faculty in-charge contact details also to be included in case of School participants)
3. There is no registration fee. All participants must carry valid institute I-Cards.

Participants are requested not to carry food or beverages to the venue

Landmark Quiz Pune 2009

The next Landmark Quiz in Pune is to be held on February 21, 2009 (a Saturday). Note that the Quizmaster will be Dr. Navin Jayakumar who is very well-known for conducting editions of this quiz at other locations (Chennai and now Bangalore). The winner and runner-up teams will qualify for the National Finals on August 15, 2009 at Chennai.

Please note that the venue (which has been Nehru Memorial Hall in the past) has not been finalised yet.

Update
The venue is Ganesh Kala Krida Manch.

ZEST - Sports Quiz

The College of Engineering, Pune will be organising a Sports Quiz as a part of 'Zest' , the annual sports meet.

Details: The Quiz is open to all engineering students (undergrads only).Cross college teams are allowed. Participants are requested to get their College I cards . Teams of two. Registration fees : Rs 50 per team.

Time and Venue: 1pm , Friday the 23rd of January in Room NO 13 , Mechanical Dept. COEP.

QM: Aditya Gadre

Sample Questions:
1. Connect : Fred the Red and Captain Fear
2. In 1991 , Bertrand Gachot was arrested for attacking a London cab driver with CS gas. What was the impact of this event on sports?
3. Complete the lyrics of this song by Johnny Wakelin
"Once there was a battle there (Chor: In Zaire, in Zaire) Hundred thousand people there (Chor: In Zaire, in Zaire) All those people gathered there (Chor: In Zaire, in Zaire To see the ________________________- (Chor: The-e-ere - in Zaire"

Answers:
1. Mascots of Manchester United and Tampa Bay Buccaneers . Thus the connect is sports franchises owned by Malcolm Glazer.
2. Michael Schumacher got his big break in F1
3. Rumble in the Jungle

Contact: Aditya - 9881101291

Requiem for a Theme : Music Quiz this weekend

The next edition of the BCQC's experimental Theme League will be held this Saturday at the Boat Club.

Details:
Flavour: Western Music
Quizmaster: Aditya Gadre
Venue: Boat Club , College of Engineering Pune
Time: 1:30 pm , Saturday , 17th January 2009.

For all those interested:

-The quiz will consist of a written round followed by normal passing round . Prelims and Finals if you will. The participants will be put into teams depending on elims score. All participants will be included in the finals .
-Please get a pen/pencil/quill /some other writing instrument . Writing will be involved.
-Though it isn't mandatory , it'd be nice if you could mail me (aditya(at)bcqc(dot)org> to let me know if you are coming so that I have a rough idea about the number of elim sheets to print. For further details and reviews of past quizzes you can visit the Theme league page on the bcqc website. PS: In case you still have any questions , contact me at 9881101291

BCQC – December 2008 newsletter

BCQC – December 2008 newsletter

After his first Grand Slam victory, asked if he was 6"3' tall, his mother replied he was 6-3, 6-7, 7-6, 6-4. Name this Olympic champion.

Happy New Year, or like some of us like to call it, Happy Great Gregorian Calendar Convention Conspiracy.

A cold December saw subdued activity at the BC, but there are a couple of things to mention. Here goes.

Quizzes

1. IIT Bombay's Mood Indigo (20-23 Dec) Some of the BCQC College quizzers took part in several quizzes at Mood-I 2008. Most notably, they won both the General Quiz (Aditya Gadre & Suvajit Chakraborty) as well as the Sports Quiz (Aditya Gadre again, this time with Aniket Khasgiwale).

2. BC “Requiem for a Theme” Business Quiz Suvajit conducted the Business Theme quiz as part of "Requiem for a Theme". A tough elims and a somewhat undercooked final resulted from it. The next set of themes are likely to be on English music, History, and Geography, depending on availability of quizmasters.

3. BC Quizzes
BC quizzes were conducted by Suraj Menon, Yash Tamaskar, Aditya Gadre, with contributions from others.

Upcoming Quizzes in January

1. BC Infest 2009 – Jan 4th: Quizzes on Religion, Science and Philosophy (Ganesh Hegde), Comics and Cartoons (Yasho), and General (Aditya). Details here.

2. SIIB Clairvoyance 2009 – Jan 10-11th: As part of Ignisense 09, the Symbiosis Institute of International Business is organizing a business quiz for B-School students and to be conducted by Dhananjay Shettigar. Two member teams from the same college. See their website for details.

3. VIT’s Quiz-o-Mania – Jan 30th: VIT’s Annual General Open Quiz. Watch this link for details. Previous quiz reports here.

4. The next BCQC Open Quiz is likely to be held on the 1st of Feb. Please let us know if there are other quizzes/exams scheduled around that time.

I've started so I'll finish

* Questions from the making of Balls, Ballots, Bollywood are now available. Read this to know how to get them.

* The next edition of the Pune Landmark Quiz is scheduled for the 21st of February. We’ll keep this post updated as details emerge.

* The Odyssey Quiz, one of the biggest open quizzes in India, was scheduled to be held on the 26th of Jan in Chennai. The event has been cancelled.

* The industrious Rohit Nair has a bigger list of upcoming quizzes from around India.

* If you are organizing a quiz and want to let people know about it, write into us ("contact"-at-"bcqc.org") with the salient details and we'll put it up on our website.

* We love to hear comments about quizzes, especially those that we do. Use the comments sections on our blog posts to do so, or write to us.

Happy third day of January to everyone!

Answer to Oblig Question: Boris Becker (after his 1st Wimbledon; he won the Olympic doubles gold with Michael Stich in 1992)

Previous BCQC newsletters here.

Balls, Ballots, Bollywood - Questions!

There are two ways to get hold of the questions from Balls, Ballots, Bollywood:

1. View them on Slideshare at this link, where you may note:
a. To download, you will need a (free) Slideshare account
b. Some of the conversion to flash isn't very good, with text spilling over to the footer. However, if you are on the page of the presentation, you will see a transcript below that you can read from.

2. Download them from our Google Sites link (may be available for a limited period of time - about a couple of weeks only). Here, the elims are ~10 MB because they have a couple of the audio-visuals.

Please note that:
1. This set contains all the questions asked - prelims, finals (3 segments), final-within-final.
2. The size of the ppts are big. Audio-visual, being big, have not been uploaded, but paraphrased. (However, the 2nd link has a couple of audio-videos in the elims, leading to the big size).
3. Warning: the ppts have answers at the end.

Suggested order: Elims, Elims Answers, Rules and a Tribute, Finals-Balls, Ballots, Bollywood, Final Round. But you can mix it up and surprise yourself.

Please leave a comment or email me in case of meta-questions, clarifications, comments, corrections, and/or commendations. Please be kind.

BCQC InFest 2009

Firstly everyone at the BCQC wishes you a very Happy New Year.

And getting on to business , the Boat Club Quiz Club will be ringing in the new year with our annual InFest Quiz Session. InFest involves a two or three full length quizzes as opposed to just the one that usually takes place at normal sessions . It generally lasts for about 5-6 hours and promises to be great fun .

Details:

Time : 2 pm ; 4th Jan , 2009
Venue: Boat Club , College of engineering Pune

Quizzes:
1. Ganesh Hegde , who has come all the way from the US, will be doing a Religion, Philosophy and Mythology quiz. The topics may seem intimidating but the quiz will be filled with great workable questions . Basically , you don't need to know a lot about the topics to do well at this quiz.
2. Aditya Gadre will be doing his " Not-so-general General Quiz" . Name of quiz to be explained at Infest.
3. Yasho Tamaskar will be doing a Comics and Cartoons Quiz.
4. Suvajit Chakraborty will also be doing some questions

We may just have other people doing quizzes. If anyone else wants to bring questions , you are most welcome.

You don't need to be teamed up while coming to a BCQC session. Everyone takes part in the quizzes. There are no formalities as such. Just show up if you want to have some fun and great quizzing in a casual atmosphere.

Everyone's Invited!

Cheers, Aditya.

PS: In case of any queries , you can contact me at 9881101291.

"Quiz on the Beach" - TAPMI, Manipal

Forwarding details of a quiz at TAPMI, Manipal:

---

Is the possibility of a recession giving you sleepless nights? Do you feel like taking some time off and chilling out? How does a visit to a beach sound? Or would you like to involve yourself in some serious quizzing? What if you were offered the chance of doing both at the same time? Sounds interesting???

T. A. Pai Management Institute's annual B-School fest, Atharva invites you to participate in the Quiz on the Beach (QOTB) to be held at Kaup Beach, Udupi, Karnataka. QOTB is held on the shores of the magical Arabian Sea with an old British built lighthouse serving as a backdrop. So pack your bags and come down to Kaup Beach for some serious fun!!!

Quiz Flavour: Business Quiz
Host: T. A. Pai Management Institute, Manipal
Quiz Master: Mr. Arul Mani
Date: 10th January 2009
Open to Corporates.

Please check out the links below for further details:
Poster and Rules (link to http://www.tapmi.org/atharva/Qotb.pdf)
Atharva - Picasa Album (link to http://picasaweb.google.com/atharva09.tapmi)
Atharva Website (link to http://www.tapmi.org/atharva)
Quiz On The Beach – Registration for Corporates (link to http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=poEj6Zaq5kogDVBjn9YxnXw&hl=en)

For further Clarifications contact:
Puneet Kapoor : 09880885040
S. Gopinath : 09742353966
Nikhil Bhat : 09742502691
E- Mail: atharva09.tapmi@gmail.com

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BCQC - October and November 2008 newsletter

Oblig Question: (1637, Original) French: "Je pense, donc je suis"; Latin: ?

A round up of the last two months of BCQC quizzing. October saw several quizzes, including a BCQC Open Quizzing Day, while November was very, very quiet thanks to a lot of people having to answer more boring questions in exams and such-like.

Quizzes

1. Oct 02 – Oct 04: Mindspark

Mindspark is the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP)'s annual science and technology college fest. Three quizzes, set and conducted by COEP quizzers, were held as part of this, its 2^nd edition.

a. Chakravyuuh: The 9^th edition of Chakravyuuh was held on the 2^nd of Oct. This, an open general quiz, is COEP biggest quiz of the year. Read this report for results.

b. Torquest: This is a Science and Technology quiz only for college students which was won by Abhishek and Raghav. A summary of results here.

c. Barqing Mad!: The report of this open Entertainment quiz can be read here.

2. Oct 12: BCQC Open Quizzing Day

Every two months or so, the BCQC organizes two open quizzes in a formal setting. The morning quiz is usually based on a theme, or is specifically for schools or colleges, or is simply just unconventional. The afternoon quiz is an open General quiz. A list of all these BCQC Open quizzes is available here on our website.

As part of this series, two quizzes were conducted in October.

a. Balls, Ballots, Bollywood: This was an India quiz on politics, cricket, and Hindi films, conducted by J. Ramanand. A full report and analysis can be read here. The quiz-creator assures that the questions will be made available before the year is done! :-)

b. BCQC October General Quiz: A report of this quiz conducted by Apurva and Akhil can be read at this link.

BC Quizzes

We had fewer BC quiz sessions in the last couple of months and no theme quizzes as part of "Requiem for a Theme". Expect this to change in December. BC sessions are informal quizzes in an unusual setting - by the riverside at COEP.

Upcoming Quizzes

The plans for December consist of one or two theme quizzes as part of BC sessions. These will be announced on our mailing lists. December also will see one of India's biggest college events, IIT Bombay's Mood Indigo (20-23 Dec). The website suggests there are a couple of mainstream quizzes (General, Sports) and some fancier ones (Food and Beverages, Travel and Places, and 3 short Lit quizzes).

I've started so I'll finish

* The BCQC was covered by the Times of India. The article can be read online here. Do not, I repeat "do not", take the utterances contained within too seriously. We quiz, we joke.

Incidentally, this story involves what we call a "fox paws". Members of the BCQC were interviewed back in August for this story. A story featuring our photos appeared the next week in this article, with only one tiny problem: the featured group was one with the noble aim of raising voter awareness among Indians. Some of our friends inquired if the BCQC had finally got around to doing something constructive with their time, but we're happy to reassure you that's not quite the case. We do urge you to participate in the electoral process, but if you just want to quiz, that's fine by us too. It's a democracy, after all.

* Curious to know how a quiz is put together? You might be interested in reading about the making of Balls, Ballots, Bollywood (parts one and two).

* If you are in Bombay and looking for quizzing succour, drop by our friends at the Bombay Quiz Club.

* If you are organizing a quiz and want to let people know about it, write into us ("contact"-at-"bcqc.org") with the salient details and we'll put it up on our website.

* We love to hear comments about quizzes, especially those that we do. Use the comments sections on our blog posts to do so

See you at the next quiz!

Answer to Oblig Question: Cogito, Ergo Sum ("I think, therefore I am":: Rene Descartes)

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 2

First apologies to all those who have been asking for a copy of the questions. I'm having some serious trouble with my PC right now that renders me hapless when dealing with MS Office. It'll be out soon.

In Part 1, I explained how I went about collecting the content for my quiz. Hopefully, those who were there were pleasantly surprised by the chosen format. Here's how I went about it:

Format
Most quizzes don't allow for any tactical decisions. An Infinite Rebounds based quiz is uniform, which is kind to the serious quizzer who is fed up of artificial ways to inject drama into quizzes. "Showy" quizzes have disruptive rounds such as buzzers, rounds with very uneven scoring, which may be fun for the audience, but painful for the good teams on stage. But IR can be a tad boring and monotonous. All teams need to do is to focus on the next question, and not worry about any kind of tactics, except for in the odd long connect. It's a classical format, but one for the purists.

Worse, a theme quiz can aggravate these problems further because not everyone is keen on the subject of the quiz. Round-and-round-the-mulberry bush can put you off to zzz-land.

I wanted the format to:

1. Have equal weightage for all three topics
2. Force teams to make a few tactical decisions throughout the quiz
3. Not overly penalise teams who aren't good at any one topic; conversely, don't make it possible for teams who are good at only one theme to get lucky (say, by somehow getting all the questions on one theme in a mixed set)

I chose three separate "sets", one per topic. To normalise performance across sets, teams would get points in a range, depending on their performance in that set. Initially, I thought of assigning scores from 1 to 6 based on position. But that would be unfair if a team completely swept the round - the others still wouldn't be too far away. We have been experimenting with different scoring methods in our BC theme quizzes, so I chose to go for the relative method. The winner of a set gets 5 points; the rest get a score from 0 to 5, relative to the winner's score. So if the winner had 100, they get 5. If the next team gets 80, they end with a relative score of (80/100)*5 = 4. A team gets 65? - a score of 3.25.

The winner would be the team that gets the maximum aggregate across all three sets. This sounded fine, until I realised the flaw.

What if the same team single-handedly won the first two sets? They would have 10, and no one else could catch them. The race for top spot would be over 2/3rds of the way! So I put in a final-within-a-final concept. The teams with the top two scores after the three sets would make it to this last round (as it turned out, I put 3 teams in the finals as 2nd and 3rd were closely clustered). That way, I could ensure interest would remain alive till the end of the three sets. Also, this gave trailing teams a chance to catch up, especially if they could dominate the last round and push the others back.

I designed each set to be identical - after playing around with ideas, I settled on starting with 4 common qns of 5 pts each (10 pts each could allow teams to get a huge lead), followed by IR for 10 qns (initially, I wanted at least 12 so that all 6 teams would be assured of at least 2 qns each, but changed my mind since I had so many common qns).

The last 2 qns (10 pts each) would be for one individual per team. Each person on a team had to take part in a set of their choice. This was one of the tactical questions in the quiz.

I wanted to try this because I think it gives each person a chance to shine, as well as makes it hard for teams to hide a weak member. We have a system where the top 6 teams after the prelims qualify outright, while the next 3 teams are split up and each member added to these 6. In this case, I allowed the teams (in ascending order of scores) to pick a member. Normally, teams would have picked the best possible person (hence, went from lowest to highest, to have somewhat balanced teams), but in this case, they would also have to weigh in the need to have three people with complementary skills.

The other tactical questions:

1. Each team got 1 attempt to go for an answer "out of turn" i.e. you can whisper the answer to the QM without waiting for your chance in IR. I usually keep this to prevent inadvertent sitters which can penalise other teams. The top 2 teams got an additional chance (to compensate for their late chances to pick their 'drafts'). Since teams had only 1 or 2 "out of turn"-ers in the entire quiz, they had to decide when to use it and when to guess that teams ahead of them would be unable to answer.
2. The final round for the top teams had 6 questions, 2 in each topic. Ordinarily, they would get 10 for a correct answer. They could choose to double if confident, with a penalty of -5.

It was interesting to watch teams apply these at various points. I think the rules weren't as confusing as initially feared!

I must confess that the last round could be a little unfair to a team that swept all three sets only to lose in the small last round. My hope was that I would choose questions of equal weight that would reflect the finals and not distort the final standings (not entirely successful in reality). That said, I was prepared to tolerate some unfairness (it was easy as I wasn't participating :-)). I also realised that it is very easy to engineer a close finish if you have very few questions - a common trick employed by most of the 'show pony' quizzes.

Finally, a mention that the 4 starter qns were set around the old game of 'Name, Place, Animal, Thing' and that even the prelims had three sets of 8 qns each. And despite the ineptness of my local photocopy guy, it is probably the first ever horizontal prelims sheet!

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 1

It may be a tad conceited to write about the making of a quiz, but since this was the hardest quiz that I have ever set, I thought it would be interesting to write about the lessons learnt and decisions taken along the way.

The genesis of this quiz was in a bad cricket quiz that I participated in with Harish and others earlier this year. I hadn't been to a good cricket quiz in a long time and felt it was a pity this was such a bad quiz that taught me nothing new or interesting. I had the idea of a "Religions of India" quiz, about cricket, films, and politics. I had never participated in a formal quiz about Indian politics. The closest was a lovely BC quiz by Ganesh Hegde (always the quizzer, never the dancer). I pitched the idea to Harish, but soon, I had begun to form some strange ideas about the format. I requested him to let me go ahead with this alone.

I was wary of doing it alone because I did not (still don't) know a lot about Indian cricket. I had a reasonable interest in politics, but only of the last two decades. Hindi films was much easier (or so I thought). In the end, I estimate it took me about 100 days worth of reading, thinking, and setting to come up with the quiz. I have always been over-enthusiastic about setting quizzes, perhaps to the point of obsession. I spent a great deal of time coming up with my last BC open quiz last November. I guess I like the creative elements of the setting: the anxieties of not having quiz-worthy content, poring over formats and presentations, composing the written parts of the question to be both devious and subtle, and so on.

This time, I had decided not to simply dip my toes into subjects (as sometimes happens in general quiz-settings). Rather, I would try and dive deep by reading as many original sources as possible in the three topics. Setting general quizzes is easier because I collect little nuggets of possibilities each day, from just keeping my eyes and ears open. Come general quiz time, I always have something to begin from. In this case, I was starting with the tank on empty.

My last BC open quiz was hugely complicated - each of the 42 questions seemed to be made up of 2-3 sub-questions. In addition, my experiments with the elims format, a semi-final for the draft picks, elims scoring etc. seemed to make matters worse. I labeled it the "No Smoking" quiz, in reference to the then released Anurag Kashyap film of seemingly equal complexity! I had not intended it to be so much of an indulgent trip, and it provoked some soul-searching. Using the feedback from that quiz and other experiences, I decided the following:

1. Content: keep it as simple as possible, especially since the themes are off-beat. Will stick to post-Independence India.
2. Format: continue to experiment

Content
As a quizzer, each year, I'm astonished at how much we don't know. As a quiz-setter, I'm astonished to discover newer quiz-worthy things to ask. If we ever feel that we've run out of questions, then we're just not looking hard enough. I hoped to convey this very feeling to anyone who came to this quiz wondering what could be asked in these three topics.

I did not want to refer to any specialist quiz books for inspiration. The only option was to read and to do so in copious amounts. I had about three-four months left for my quiz, so I began with the topic I was most ignorant of: Politics.

Long before I planned my quiz, I had bought Ramchandra Guha's India after Gandhi. It is a bit of a tome, but it told me a lot about post-Independence India. Definitely recommended for everyone, especially since we have very few books about 1947 and later. I also read a book about Kashmir Frontline Kashmir by a former BBC correspondent and Cutouts, Caste, and Cine-Stars (by Vasanthi), which is about TN politics. I re-read parts of Vaibhav Purandare's book about the Shiv Sena. Using some hooks from these books, I read a lot of articles online. I had a little bit of a 'quota system' in order to represent both different eras as well as regions, so based on what I already knew, I looked up articles about specific people and groups.

I've come to realise that even the good cricket quizzers don't seem to know a great deal about Indian cricket. Admittedly, it is a very niche topic and potentially, a dry one. Hence, I chose to primarily go for interesting anecdotes rather than stats. A failing of sports quizzes is that they become too personality or stat-oriented. I tried to avoid these. Despite that, 7 of the 8 elims questions on cricket were answered by cricketer's names! I let that be because most of these questions were largely about anecdotes.

BTW, I also did some reading about cricket. Some sources for these: Spin and Other Turns (R. Guha once again), Sandeep Bamzai's book on Bombay cricket, books by Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar's biography (Purandare again), Indian cricket controversies - a bitchy book that I found via Google Books, and of course, the dependable Cricinfo archives.

Thankfully, teams on stage could grapple with questions on both politics and cricket.

Hindi films, something that I'm interested in, turned out to be very slippery at the end. I had left it for late, since I thought I had enough resources and jottings to see me through. I was mistaken. I wanted to ask mainstream Bollywood, so few or no questions on parallel cinema (which has been an easier quizzing fount). I looked at some of the books I owned on this topic, looked at my notes from the Encylopaedia of Indian Cinema, foraged around online, and in the end, just thought of films I owned or had seen. I wanted to have a fairly high percentage of A/V (a first for me, since I am never confident that the supporting audio/visual technology at the quizzing venue will hold up). In the end, I just about made the minimum cut.

This is already a big post, so jottings on the format in a following article.

October General Open Quiz - Report

Set and conducted by: Apoorva Dubey and Akhil
Flavour: General
Participation: ~40 teams

Results:
1st: (B) Vibhendu Tiwari + Nikhil Motlag + J. Ramanand (draft): 140
2nd: (E) Salil Bijur + Yash Tamaskar + Yash Marathe (draft): 105
Jt. 3rd: (C) Suraj Menon + Arnold D'Souza + Kaustubh Bhat (draft): 55
Jt. 3rd: (F) Tushar Kaul + Shiv Anant Tayal + Anand Sivashankar (draft): 55
5th: (D) Suvajit Chakraborty + Aditya Gadre + Roshith Mohan (draft): 50

6th: (A) Gautam + Ramprakash + Sudarshan Shidore (draft): 30

~50 questions in IR; some "free hit" questions; Elims cutoff: top 6: 9, draft: 8; I couldn't record the elims scores

Report
This quiz had the toughest elimination round I can ever recall having attempted. We were lucky to squeeze in as draft picks, with those who didn't losing out on the proverbial hair's breadth. This resulted in a very new (and some would say, fresh) lineup on stage.

Many of the questions in both the finals and elims were good. In fact, some were excellent. However, these were somewhat obscured because several of the remaining questions could have been better framed, or had too many elements to provide. I am not sure if it happened only to us, but we were a little disoriented in the elims! In addition, the coverage of topics was fairly western-centric; however, that is preferable to artificially including topics that don't interest the quiz masters. That said, there were more questions on literature and art than other routine BCQC quizzes. I also liked the science questions.

There was a lot of new things to be learnt in this quiz and that made it worthwhile for me. What did you think? Use the comments to let us know.

Oct 2008 Open morning quiz - "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - Report

Set and conducted by: J. Ramanand
Flavour: Indian Cricket, Indian Politics, Hindi Films
Participation: 29 teams

Results: (with final-within-final scores)
1st: "C-Madan ke Chinese Chakkars" B.V.Harish Kumar + Salil Bijur + Shiv Anant Tayal (draft): 70 pts
2nd: "D-Ranjeet ke Pujaaris" Anand Sivashankar + Vibhendu Tiwari + Nikhil Motlag (draft): 60 pts
3rd: "E-Lotus-eyed Eaters" Amit Varma + Pradeep Ramarathnam + Tushar Kaul (draft) :55 pts
4th: "B-Bob ke Bajrangbaliis" - Suraj Menon + Yash Marathe + Brijesh Nair (draft)
5th: "A-Shetty's Hairraisers" - Saransh Verma + Anubhav Chatterjee + Suvajit Chakraborty (draft)
6th: "F-Hercules ke Muscules" - Subhodeep Jash + Ritoban Sengupta + Abhishek Nagaraj (draft)

Elims
A 24-questions elims (split equally amongst the three topics) saw 9 teams being selected for the finals. I apologise for the problems with the videos; it tooks us three laptops before we could somehow get that going. Despite starting right on time, this snafu set us back by about 30 minutes - I hope it wasn't too inconvenient in the end.

The elims cutoff was 10.5 for the top 6 outright qualifiers, and 9 for the next 3 teams, who were split up in a "draft pick" format. This meant the top 6 teams could pick one of these 6 qualifiers, starting with the 6th-placed team to qualify. Since all three members would have to take part individually in a solo round in the finals, there was a tactical element to this.

The elims scores: A+V(19), H+S (16), S+Y (15), A+P (11.5), S+A & S+R (10.5); Abhishek+Nikhil & Brijesh+Suvajit (10) , Shiv + Tushar (9).

Finals
This consisted of three identically formatted rounds, one on each topic. Each round began with a set of four common questions for 5 pts each, followed by 10 questions on Infinite Rebounds (10 pts each), ending with 2 qns of 10 each. The last two had to be simultaneously attempted by one representative from each time. Teams were then allotted scores relative to the top score in the round (from 0 to 5).

True to billing, Team E pipped C to the top spot in the cricket set, and picked up all 5 relative points. Scores were evenly spread out in this section. However, the battle picked up in politics, with C & D sharing honours, and staying ahead of the rest. The final section was surprisingly one-sided, even though the Vibhendu-led attack of Team D swept the standings as expected. Teams A, B, and C were expected to do better, but couldn't. Unfancied F, who had been struggling till then, were a surprise 2nd place.

Finals-within-Finals
The top two teams after the regular finals were D & C (final scores in the image above). However, Team E was also admitted to the last round because they were fairly close to the top two. This last round consisted of 6 qns, 2 from each topic. Open to all three in simultanous-mode, the default scoring was 10 for a correct answer. However, if confident, teams could choose to double it but with a penalty of -5.

The first cricket qn was found to be too cryptic (perhaps even bad!). E took control of the 2nd by correctly doubling. The other two did not score, leaving the underdogs on top. E further drove in the advantage by doubling their first politics qn. C too answered correctly, but did not dare double. D got this wrong. Scores were daringly placed at C=10, D=0, E=40.

The 2nd politics question was too easy for all teams: they each cracked 20. C=30, D=20, E=60. It looked like it would be E's quiz to lose from now on.

Alas, the first films question was correctly taken on the double by both C & D, but E, playing it safe, could not answer. One question to go, and we had C=50, D=40, E=60. It was anyone's game from here. In case of ties, the team with the higher score after the main finals would win. All teams had to double this one irrespective of their answer in order to win.

The last question caused a lot of hair-scratching. Eventually C & D submitted their answers. E agonised over whether to double (they had to, otherwise D would win if they got the question right on tie-breakers), and then on the answer.

They picked the wrong one. C & D both got it right. Scores: C: 70, D: 60, E: 55.

C won the quiz as a result.

Final comments
I leave it to the participants (both finalists and others) to comment about whether they liked the questions and the format. I will put up a separate post on some of the "design" decisions behind the quiz. I must add that the format was always likely to be a little unfair to a team or two. D lost narrowly despite their leading performance in both the elims (a 3 pt margin) and the main finals (a 1.5 pt margin). But they were fairly nice about it :-). Thanks also to a patient audience, some of whom gave some terrific answers that had nonplussed even the finalists.

Thanks to everyone who came to the quiz, to Amit, Suraj & Yash for helping out with the scoring, and to Suvajit for timely help with the laptop.

I will try to make the questions available after suitable post-production.

BCQC Open Quizzes - October

We’re back with the next set of BCQC Open quizzes. Here are the details:

When: Sunday, 12th October, 2008 Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems Ltd., Senapati Bapat Road (need directions? See http://bcqc.org/?q=participate)

What Quiz 1: “Balls, Ballots, Bollywood” – a three-in-one quiz on Indian cricket, Indian politics and Hindi films Reporting Time: 9:15 am Quiz Time: 9:30 am to 1 pm By: J. Ramanand

Quiz 2: October General Quiz  Reporting Time: 2:15 pm Quiz Time: 2:30 pm to 6 pm By: Akhil and Apurva

How: (same for both quizzes) Teams of 2 members (don't have a teammate? don't worry, you might find one at the venue) Top 9 teams for the finals No prior registration needed, no entry fees, open for all

Prizes Sponsored by Landmark, Pune Prizes for all finalists Prizes for Best School and Best College teams

Contact Email: contact - at - bcqc_dot_org Phone: Ramanand (97642 58560), Salil (98231 12258)

BarQing Mad! - Entertainment quiz at MindSpark '08

Set by : Yasho Tamaskar , Aditya Gadre , Aniket Khasgiwale .

Conducted BY : Yasho Tamaskar

Results:
1st : J Ramanand and BV HArish Kumar : 145
2nd : Salil Bijur and Suraj Menon : 115
3rd : Suvajit Chakraborty and Sayak Dasgupta : 100
4th : Akhil and Apoorva : 95
5th : Meghashyam Shirodkar and Venkat Srinivasan : 55
6th : Mihir Muley and Chinmay Nivargi : 15

Format: 42 seamless IR , Two long connects

The quiz was quite entertaining with 4 teams doing well fighting it out for the top three spots . JR and BVHK gave some great answers and cracked both themes before everyone else . Suraj and Salil gave some brilliant answers but lost out due to the theme rounds. Ahkil and Apoorva and Salil and Suraj were tied upto the last round but were beaten as they didn't get the theme. Last years winners ,Suvajit and Sayak didn't seem to be on top form and missed a few easy ones. They did make a big comeback in the last round to just pip Akhil and Apoorva to third place.

Torquest 2008

Set by : Kaustubh Bhat , aniket Khasgiwale , Mohit Karve , Aditya Bhedasgaonkar , Avnish Dhongde and Aditya Gadre

Conducted By : Kaustubh Bhat
Results:
1st : Abhishek Nagaraj and Raghav Chakravarthy - 145 pts
2nd : Saransh Verma and Karan Chawla - 60 pts (won on higher elims score)
3rd : Suvajit Chakraborty and Amit Dandekar - 60 pts
4th : PS Sriram and Omkar Nene - 50 pts
5th : Rohan Pandit and Varad Deshmukh - 40 pts
6th : Rohan Jain and Dhruv Chadha - 10 pts

Leave opinions and suggestions in Comments section.

Chakravyuh 2008

Set by : Aditya Gadre and Aniket Khasgiwale with Kaustubh Bhat and Yasho Tamaskar in supporting roles. Gaurav Sabnis made a sweeping cameo with several questions for the finals and the elims.

Conducted by : Aditya and Aniket

Standings (elim score in brackets):
1st : J Ramanand and BV Harish Kumar : 110 pts (28)
2nd : Amit Varma and Sumant Srivathsan : 90 pts (25)
3rd : Sarat Rao and S Balakrishnan : 70 pts (24)
4th : Meghashyam Shirodkar and Amit Garde : 60 pts (25)
4th : Salil Bijur and Yash Marathe : 60 pts (24)
6th : Prasann Potdar and Mukund Krishnan : 50 pts (24)

QM's notes : (JR will be putting up unbiased detailed report later)
- Simple elims just like last year . The cut off was 24 . The top six teams were very close on elims score.
- Finals : We tried as much as possible to make good questions on all topics. Some topics were slightly neglected (Current affairs , Literature, Art to name a few)
-Though there seamed to be some simpler ones , as far as I remember , there was no god-awful sitter as such.
- An altercation-free finals would have been desirable , but unfortunately that was not to be. Maybe a more clear policy on part marks is needed.
-Also a final without questions falling prey to the finger of god would be awesome but Kaustubh Bhat goes into the record books by managing to fit in the finger of god even with a flash presentation.
-We apologise for the lighting and state of the auditorium. The college really let us down in that department.
- As for the result , Ramanand and Harish gave some really good answers and finally broke their string of four consecutive bridesmaid trophies with an excellent and deserved win. Sumant and Amit also gave some great answers to give Ramanand and Harish some stiff competition for most of the quiz.

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Participant's views Report by Ramanand:

Chakravyuuh 2008 - Report and Results An excellent Chakravyuuh once again. The elims were felt to be on the easier side, but that was a sentiment pronounced mainly by the 'experienced' lot. The setters had designed it so that most people could do reasonably well at the preliminary stage. The result was a high range of 24-28 for the finalists.

Several questions in the finals were brilliant. Despite some of these being unanswered by anyone, the answers were of the "should have thought of that" variety. A nice variety of themes, especially some good Indian questions.

There were a few odd easy ones, but I don't think that affected the standings too much. All teams had their share of excellent answering, and the final result clusters do not completely reflect the closeness of the contest.

Both quizmasters took us through the quiz with a very competent air; in addition, the partly refurbished COEP auditorium made it an easier place to quiz compared to the exhaustion of the past. The quiz was simple in format too, with the setters resisting the temptation to add unnecessary frills.

On a personal note, our team won its first Chakravyuuh in its 6th attempt, with 4 of those attempts ending in a runner-up's bridesmaid gown. (Old-timers will recall that Harish and I were among the organisers for the first ever Chakravyuuh quiz and so have treated this is a performance at 'home', hence the desire to win it at least once!)

Participants are invited to post your views on the quiz in the comments section. Any comments , opinions or suggestions will be useful to the quiz organisers. The quiz was organised under the aegis of "Mindspark", COEP's flagship technical event, and there are two more quizzes coming up on Friday (Technical) and Saturday (Entertainment).

Do leave opinions/suggestions in the Comments section.