Quizzes at IIM Bangalore

They say that Bangalore is the intellectual capital of the country. Justice was made to this fact by two stunning and highly entertaining quizzes at the Indian Institute of Management this weekend. The first quiz was simply titled "the Corporate Quiz". The quiz was only for corporates. This was my first ever foray into an out and out corporate quiz. Our team sounded like a formidable one (Oracle + Texas Instruments) but didn't live up to its name! LOL!!! The quizmaster was Mitesh Agarwal, popularly known as the practising quizmaster(remember, he won the ACM Bangalore quiz last week). The prelims were absolutely fantastic...TQC Style workoutable questions. But the final was a lot geeky and meant for pure bred corporate quizzers. I was left absolutely clueless in most questions. There were 30 questions in the prelims with 19 as the cutoff. We got something around 13.

The second quiz was titled, "Bizarre", an Open Business Quiz organized by Derek O'Brien and Associates and conducted by Derek himself. Derek is a strict guy and very specific about his rules. The quiz started bang on time. Unfortunately, Derek did not allow me to participate competitively (even though i pleaded to him personally)since I was late by 5 minutes and I did not possess 2 other team-mates. Anyway, I spent my time enjoying the quiz as a third person and it was one hell of an experience. The quiz was absolutely fantastic! The best thing about the O'Briens' quizzes are that they are totally logical. These guys focus on common sense more rather than out and out thoroughbred knowledge. And that is what I like about them. Quizzing needs to transform from a geeky activity to a fun activity. I hope we manage to produce more like the O'Briens who can take this form of popular quizzing to the masses.

Judging from a purely cognitive point of view, the entire quiz was damn easy. But the questions were damn tricky as well. After attending the entire quiz, I was sure as hell that if team Blitzkrieg had participated in this quiz, it could have easily come 2nd or 3rd. (and won ourselves a few lenovo laptops and some 70k prize money :) ). The finals were conducted at the amphitheater and Derek was at his scintillating best. The quiz was amazing fun. (I am repeating this again and again to give justice to this event :D). I really enjoyed the parts when Derek snubbed those ultra-geeky quizzers on stage who wanted to boast off their knowledge by saying stupidly weird things when the answer was oh-so-simple.

Quizzing is not all about asking questions and answering them. It's also about entertainment, fun and something which everyone can enjoy...

I'll put up all the questions on my next post...