Earlier this month I did the Kirorimal College Economics 5th year in a row. Thanks to the outreach team of the organizers there were more than 150 teams, last year there were 74 teams. The quiz had a fair distribution amongst various topics along with a few Delhi based questions thrown in. With so many teams participating the margin of error was minimal and as a result some of the regulars missed out on the tie-breakers. The finals had 3 non-DU teams. A sizeable achievement for other universities, hopefully that’s a trend and not an exception. I have always believed the future of quizzing lies in creating great experiences for the audience and the participants (in that order). Because it’s the audience that acts as a catalyst in creating a great atmosphere, the difference between playing in a full house stadium and an empty stadium. Thus, I introduced a couple of new rounds that I had never done before. Both the rounds, Bank my Moolah and I Bet I Know this One worked extremely well. And I think we would be doing more of them in future. The team from FMS made early inroads in the first round with a healthy lead of 9 points over their nearest rivals from BVCOE. The second round saw all teams but FMS make progress. The third round had everybody playing safe and hardly anybody willing to risk their points in pursuit of doubling their score. This meant FMS maintained the lead going into the final round. The final round saw the five remaining teams looking for an unforced error from the other teams. And a couple of teams did actually falter by missing out on identifying the wicket that took Raman Lamba’s death and the algorithm for an elevator. In the second leg of the round, the teams realised they had to start taking risks to surge ahead or else they would be left avoiding the wooden spoon. The American drone air-strikes got BVCOE jumping the queue and getting close to troubling FMS for the top spot. FMS being experienced campaigners weren’t troubled for long as their back-to-back answers meant they would finish with a margin of 11 points to be numero uno. Final Scores- FMS- 33, BVCOE- 22, Hansraj- 15 Few questions from the quiz- 1. Since it is in vogue on the internet these days, many people started posting questions in forums as to why X doesn’t have this feature. One such post on Quora was answered by Tom Morris, one of X’s designers. As a reason for not having the feature he cited X’s privacy policy. He said X operates in a way as to not to reveal the activities of the users and the said feature (or at least a part of it) would mean recording and eventually leaking the user browsing history. What’s X and what feature? 2. With 5 letters, the longest in this list is for New Dibrugarh Town, while the shortest is for Gondia, Deula, Jalna, Raipur, Srirangapatna and Yeliyur. What am I talking about? 3. This happened for the 1st time in 1045 since he wanted to get married. 2nd time this happened in 1046 since his colleagues felt he bribed his way into this, even though he felt there was nothing wrong if he did. 1294 was when it happened for the 3rd time- ‘out of the desire for humility, his ignorance, and longing for the tranquility of his former life’ The 4th time it occurred so that a special What occurrence am I talking about? It has happened only 5 times in history.
