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

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 2^nd-3^rd-4^th 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

COVID Fundraiser Series | Report on the Football Quiz

Quiz: General Quiz on Football 

Date & Time: 6 June 2021 at 1:30 pm

Venue: Zoom

QM: Ranajeet Soman

Scores:

Jt 1st: Muddied Oafs (Rajiv Rai, Vinoo Sanjay, Brajendu Bhaskar) - 150 pts

Jt 1st: In the End, Cricket is the Winner (Prithwish Dutta, Deepanjan Deb, Sachin Deshpande) - 150 pts

Jt 1st: We believe in the cardboard (Aswath Venkataraman, Atulya Bharadwaj, Sandeep Narayan)  - 150 pts

4th: De Gea Dard (Abid Abdullah, Kunal, Shashwat Salgaoncar) - 140 pts

5th: Zulfiqar e Ingit (Anannya Deb, Venkatraghavan S, Venky Srinivasan) - 120 pts

6th: The Ball is Round - (Piyush Kedia, Kaniska Ghosh, Partha Ghatak) - 90 pts

6th: Remembrance of Things Fast (Srinath Bhashyam, Manu Sudhakar, Navin Rajaram) - 85 pts

8th: Boka Juniors (Jayashree Mohanka, Arnold D'Souza, Kinshuk Biswas) - 80 pts

Report: 

Ranajeet Soman is not only one of the best football quizzers in the country, but also one of the most rounded gen quizzers. Over the years, we have come to expect questions from him which are accessible and general even on specialist topics of his bent (football, ghazals, history and .....the band Travis) - and this one was no different. 

The football quiz in it's third edition - this one was the most gen of the lot and also the one that went through the most turmoil in terms of actually taking place - with the pandemic screwing up plans for a proper Infest this year. 

The elims were light and breezy, the questions crisply and pithily framed. One didn't need much football knowledge to answer most of the questions, but most importantly all the questions were nicely clued and were entirely workoutable. In the end, we had a few sports gawds, but mostly general quizzers qualifying for the finals - a testament to how well made the elims was. 

The finals, carried on from there the elims took off. We had 28 questions on Infinite Rebounds (+ Pounce) and 6 questions through 2 written rounds (one on music and one on social causes in football). The finals took us on a tour of history, geography, films, entertainment, politics and many other topics - all with football at its background. The only negatives for me were that some of the questions in the final were too easy which became a bit of a free for all. Overall the quiz was run quite quickly as well - with the finals ending at a reasonable time of 5:30pm - which is a rarity in quizzes these days. 

On to the results, the quiz was very close with at least 3-4 teams constantly exchanging the lead. We ended with an amazing 3 way tie on the last question - which was an exciting end to an excellent quiz.  

Unfortunately Rana has taken the wrong kind of inspiration from Suraj Menon - and told us this was his last football quiz, but we hope he will, like Suraj, come back and do several more quizzes over the years. 

COVID Fundraiser Series | Report on the General Quiz

Quiz: Magnum Dopus a.k.a. One Last Quiz (i.e., the General Quiz)

Date & Time: 19 July 2021 at 1:30 pm

Venue: A series of tubes (a.k.a the QM's and participants various homes, connected via Zoom)

QM: Suraj Menon

Scores:

Winners: WIMWI Manran (Rajiv Rai, Srinath Bashyam and Aniket Khasgiwale) - 210 pts

Runners Up: Can We Answer Now? (Navin Rajaram, Santosh Swaminathan, Preetham Upadhya) - 195 pts

3rd: Kunal's Nexus (Venkatesh Srinivasan, Ranajeet Soman, Kunal Sawardekar) - 185 pts

4th: Prisoni (Souvik Guha, Prithwish Datta, Nikhil Sonde) - 170 pts

5th: UNESCOVID (Atulaa, Bhargava, Varun) - 165 pts

6th: Matunga Manram - (Balakrishnan S, Rushi Anandan, Vinoo Sanjay) - 150 pts

6th: Vast Deferens (Abhinav, Jayant, Shaswat) - 150 pts

8th: Passing Faiz (Shashank, Abhijit) - 100 pts

Report:

Every so often, India's quizzing scene is riven by talk of the last ever quiz by Suraj Menon. The joy at attending another one of these excellently put-together quizzes soon fades into melancholy that another such will never be experienced, until another such announcement of the last ever Suraj Menon quiz starts the cycle anew. This complex interplay of emotions was in evidence during Sunday's proceedings, only to be undercut by the fact that even the Great Man himself has begun nodding to the finality of these proceedings being somewhat exaggerated.

The quiz began with a 30-question elimination round. A fun, accessible set of questions (the cut-off was 33 out of a possible 39 points) the elims started with a rather timely question on a phrase familiar to Punekars, and tested participants' knowledge of everything from the logistics of operating railway services in the Andes to Telugu remakes of John Landis' oeuvre. WIMWI Manram topped the elims with 34 points and 10 stars.

The finals had 30 questions on IR with 4 written rounds with 3 questions each. 3 of the written rounds were nicely done tributes to the subjects of the previous three quizzes in the BCQC's COVID relief series - Football, Food and India. The fourth written round was on rhyming phrases, another nice touch by the QM. The IR rounds again covered a great breadth of topics - from East African building practices, to botanical appreciation for Sichuanese mercantile innovations, to anchovy fisheries in the Eastern Pacific. Yet it was apparent that effort had been taken to make the questions workable and no question went unanswered by the finalists.

The quiz remained competitive throughout, with WIMWI Manram and Can We Answer Now? trading the lead back and forth through the quiz. Can We Answer Now? pulled 15 points clear of their challengers after the last written round, but WIMWI did some stellar answering in the final stage of the quiz and leveled the score as we went into the very last question. Said question, which asked for an ornithologically named Pune neighborhood (to bookend the Pune questions in the quiz) was answered correctly by WIMWI. Unfortunately, Can We Answer Now? took an aerobridge to nowhere on the pounce and got a -5, thus giving a clear result to the quiz.

In the end, fun was had by all, especially the participants and audience who got to enjoy a great quiz while simultaneously ribbing Suraj gently over his well-publicized aversion to questions regarding particular nominal words and the information contained in the length of blanks. We eagerly await the next last quiz.

COVID Fundraiser Series | Report on the India Quiz

Quiz: India Quiz 
Day, Date, Time: Saturday, 17th July 2021, 1.30pm
Venue: The quiz was conducted over Zoom
Format: Elims (30 questions) + Finals (42 Questions with 30 IR + 4 written theme rounds of 3 questions each)
QMs: Debanjan Bose & Sachin Deshpande

 Scores:
1. Jayashree, Partha, Piyush -210
2. Shouvik, Prithwish, Deepanjan -165
3 (Joint) Udupa, Ramkey, Shashank and Alagar, Bhargava, Priyambad -143
5. Preetham, Manu, Navin -140
6. Naman, Ashwini, Aabhas -130
7. Abhinav, Jayant, Shaswat -120
8. Salil, Samrat, Anil -115
9. Prateek, Kunal, Siddanth -80

A vibrant quiz, hosted by a couple of great guys who must be among the most likeable quizzers and quizmasters in the country. Quiz showcased our Incredible India with its multiple facets. Entire quiz was efficiently conducted with no glitches, owing to a perfect jugalbandi of both the QMs.

Accessible elims, even for non-regular quizzers, which fitted well with the theme of the Fundraiser quizzes, plus QMs being gratuitous by giving hints like "alliterative answers" to further help teams.

Therefore the elims cut-offs were insanely high, and some heavyweight teams missed out narrowly.

The finalists had a generational spread with veterans like Jayashree di and Shouvik da along with college-goers in Naman's team. It could be attributable to the variety of questions in the elims from classics like Ashokan pillar heads and jharokas, to new gen stuff like Enjoy Enjaami and Pinjra tod, with googlies like the WTC Test Mace.

 The questions were top notch, with subtleties in framing like "hit show" hint for Jaspal Bhatti's still relevant noir comedy "Flop Show" or nickname clue for Chikoo and Chiclets, to a question linking Jahangir and Indira Gandhi political goals of "Garibi Hatao" to a tough one on Haflong Hindi, but brilliantly framed.

Also, Akhand bharat questions encompassing the Indian subcontinent with Z.A.Bhutto, Qurratulain Hyder , POK, Bangladeshi enclaves making appearances.

And no good India quiz is complete without its share of interesting food questions, here we had on Lal Maas, Bhaang dishes, gin etc but also stuff on temple kitchens and the legendary fast of Irom Sharmila.

Written round themes in finals were also quirky.

Letters
Bengali Theatre (with no Bangla bias as the answers were Mousetrap, Vincent Van Gogh and IPTA)
Borders
Food Origins

QMs also did a good job with the geographical spread of questions, with almost every state and region represented. Especially North East, which is oft-neglected.

Overall a very enjoyable Saturday afternoon, with entertaining quizzing. 

Fun Fact: We had participation of 74 teams, same as the years of India's independence!

 

Report By: Samrat Sengupta

InFestYouUs 2021 | InFest 2021

 

                          InFestYouUs, the flagship event of the annual InFest, is a Mastermind-style quiz in which participants choose a specialized topic on which they are asked ten questions. They play against everyone else, who collectively form the 'Mob'. The participant gets +1 per correct answer, and -0.5 for every answer they pass/get incorrect and the Mob answers correctly.

                          This year we had the biggest line-up yet: 40 sets were conducted all in all. With a consistent number of at least 50 audience members via the Zoom call, this was surely one of the most well-attended online quiz events so far.

                          There were two winners of InFestYouUs 2021 this year. At 9/10 were Ranajeet Soman (Real Madrid La Liga Winning Coaches set by Yash Marathe) and Samanth S (The Jeeves and Wooster Stories set by J. Ramanand). Both showed uncanny mastery of their topics with Ranajeet showing his football prowess on the field of sports quizzing again. Samanth’s thorough reading of the beloved P G Wodehouse series was marvellous, to say the least. The Mob scored no points in their sets. Close behind them was Arnold D’Souza who had taken a sports set too (Test Cricket Captains set by Aniket Khasgiwale). He also scored 9, but the Mob stole half points from him like rowdy Australian fans for a total of 8.5. A shout-out of course goes to participants at 8 points. These are Naman Jain (Forts in Pune District set by Avaneendra Bhargav) and Sania Narulkar (Indian Handlooms set by Jayshree Mohanka). The Mob did not score anything in either sets. Major Chandrakant Nair’s Infectious Diseases set was acclaimed as one of the Best InFestYouUs Sets.

                        A special mention must be given for participants and quiz masters from Europe, Australia and America who participated despite their diurnal cycles.

                        A sincere thank you to all the quiz-setters for setting such brilliant sets for InFestYouUs. Heartfelt thanks to all the setters who could actually take their sets, the participants for showing up and the awesome Mob. We would also like to thank Eric Yuan and Zoom Video Communications for their cloud-based peer-to-peer video conferencing software platform, Zoom, which enabled this fest. Cheers until next year!

 Top 10 Scores:

Report by: Omkar Dhakephalkar