The Sport of Corporate Quizzing Reaches The Industrial Town of Jamshedpur

Jamshedpur Management Association organized the inaugural edition of GyanQ: An Inter Corporate Quiz in the Rajendra Vidyalaya Auditorium in Jamshedpur. The quiz was sponsored by JUSCO, ISWP, Metaldyne India, Tinplate, Tata Pigments and Narbod Construction Ltd. I remember mentioning last year in Udaan Business Quiz in Ranchi that it kick started the Indian season of quizzing, but with the quiz in Jamshedpur set to become an annual affair, the season now starts a couple of months earlier – all thanks to the organizers and sponsors.

The Stage is Set
The Stage is Set

25 strong teams from various corporates participated in the written preliminary round (here’s Telegraph reporting the quiz). It was followed by a 6-team Semi Final, and the Final with 6 teams where 5 teams qualified directly from the prelims and 1 team from the qualifier. Readers of this blog would know I like to prepare the standard of Qs in the prelims with the expectation that the highest team should score 60% and the cut-off in a 6-team final should be 40%. Well, unfortunately for me, that wasn’t quite the case. The standard deviation was too high for the 5 teams that qualified directly for the final, from the highest score of 72% (Tata Steel – Team Aditya + Rajesh) to a cut-off of 40%. I thought the Final would go only one way – the Tata Steel way. Well it did go the Tata Steel way but in a different manner altogether.

4 out of the 6 teams (including the team that qualified through the Semi Final) were from Tata Steel while the other two were from Indian Oil and SAIL. That speaks volumes about the quality of Tata Steel’s teams. Kudos! The final did have its usual suspect questions – Maria Sharapova (no, not the done-to-death Meldonium but something far more pleasant to my bachelor eyes, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition), Fauja Singh (my marathon buddy connect), ISIS (Note to Self- Done too many different ISIS questions now, so no more please), Donald Trump (when he has already been given $2 billion worth of free media don’t think another few Rupees worth matters, does it?) and, of course, a beer question (for it was a Saturday morning).

The quiz in progress
The quiz in progress

The first couple of rounds had Indian Oil and SAIL competing neck and neck with 30 points each. While SAIL collected points in both rounds, Indian Oil was more alert on the buzzer. In the 3rd round, SAIL repeated what they did in the 1st round – answer a direct question and then follow it up with amazing answer to a question nobody else knew (thus ruining the other formula that I try to keep – 60% questions to be answered by teams on stage, 20% by audience and 20% should be something new for everybody in the gathering). The 4th round was when SAIL shifted to top gear and took my questions head on à la Virat Kohli when chasing (mandatory cricket reference. CHECK). From 30 at the end of Round 2, SAIL leapfrogged to 103 points at the end of Round 4 (I tend to keep the scoring pattern such that not many teams cross the 3-figure mark in my quizzes – well that’s too many deviations from how I like my quizzes to be served 😛 ) SAIL was way behind at 50 and Tata Steel (Aditya + Rajesh) at 27.

 

Before the final round, I tried to cheer the teams who’d fallen behind with a valuable life biz quiz lesson – It’s not over until it’s over (the last 3 balls). But I don’t think it had the desired impact. For if there was any impact it was on the team from SAIL who then tried to reach 150 but, seeing their performance through the day, fell not-so-agonizingly 7 points short.

Final scores-

  1. SAIL- Mr. Srimant Mallick and Mr. Sampad Mishra: 143 points
  2. INDIAN OIL- Mr. Deepak Taneja and Mr. Nihar Ranjan Das: 50 points
  3. TATA STEEL- Mr. Aditya and Mr. Rajesh Jha: 22 points

 

Few questions from the quiz-

  1. Opened on the eve of the new millennium what tourist attraction has been associated with the following brands? British Airways (Till 2006), Merlin Entertainments (Till 2011), EDF Energy (Till 2014) and Coca Cola (Since January 2015)
  2. “If you spend enough time on the Internet you’ll eventually run across a comic strip that ends with the rage-filled punchline: “I hope you step on a ____! ” This is how a TIME magazine article started describing why stepping on ____ can cause such intense pain (____ is made of an ABS plastic polymer chain). Fill in the blank.
  3. Connect:  Tu Beer Hai, And Then There Were Four, The Jury Room, Bulb Jalega Boss and Where Magic Happens.
  4. The latest version of X is titled ‘Ultimate Banking’  and has an electronic card reader (aka an ATM). This has made X’s economy completely cashless and eliminated the possibility of a corruptible central banker. What am I talking about?

Updated: The video of the quiz can be watched here

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