I’ve never been an A level quizzer, I would rank myself as a B+ on my best days and my lousy self-ranking had plummetted further as I attended a few open quizzes in Bangalore over my three years of having lived here with ad-hoc teams and always ended up failing to qualify for the final rounds. With the thumping I have received, it seemed like an easy decision to not quiz much, though it was through college quizzing that I met people who have till date been among my best of friends.
However, rather than get horribly demoralized with repeated failures, I figured I’d rather engage in other time-killing exercises and that was the end of that.
The third guy in our team that Sai zeroed in on was someone named Manaswi, and I hadn’t seen the guy before. Turns out, Sai had mistaken our third teammate to be someone else as well, and our third guy was apparently going along the longer side and the hypotenuse of the right angled triangle while the shortest side of the triangle was the straight-line path from his house to the venue. Hence my anger directed at the third guy at the very start of this post.
Turns out, he stayed in some other part of the city altogether, and he was well aware of the shortest path from his place to Chowdaiah Memorial Hall where the quiz was being held. After a substantial wait time, which Sai and I killed by talking randomly with our respective friends, we were simultaneously attempting to scout the hall for cute chicks that had somehow turned up for the quiz. Regular KQA quizzers too were taken in by the scenery, considering the open quizzes held on sunday afternoons invariably end up being sausage-fests.
Derek O’Brien was the quiz master for the evening, and I must mention here that although a whole lot of junta abuse him for his propensity towards apparently fictitious trivia combined with some supposedly horrbile questions, he was a chlidhood hero for me, as I sat in front of our old black & white TV when I was in classes 7, 8, 9 and 10 and devoured episode after episode of his ‘Bournvita Quiz Contest’.
Hardcore quizzers do maintain that doing well in a Derek quiz doesn’t really amount to much, but you’d understand my disinclination to be a purist if you were in my shoes on the evening of November 1st 2007.
Our team name was ‘Thigh In The Sky’, as a spoof of the Alan Parsons’ Project song – ‘eye in the sky’, although I was considering naming ourselves ‘thigh of the tiger’ or ‘thighs wide shut’ after giving ourselves this particular name. In retrospect, the name turned out to be the most appropriate one, given how it forms a cool acronym, something that the third guy Manaswing made me realize AFTER the quiz. (The hindsight observation plays a vital part, as you will find out eventully).
The quiz began on he dot at half past three after we all had settled in our seats, and it turned out to be a 40 question prelim with well balanced cracks and guesses, and I was impressed with Manaswing right from the start for his having correctly answered the first question. We kept on laughing like idiots thruought and it was quite a lot of fun. I am usually the one who writes on the prelim sheet, but Sai vetoed and said he wanted to write on it instead.
After a fun prelim where we abused some really random egg and kimono related questions, and some arbit socializing later, Derek O’Brien himself came on stage and started giving out the answers to the prelims. He began straight away on a defensive note, talking about bloggers and netizens making his life miserable and that the content in this quiz would try and mitigate that, and how he loved the crowds in Bangalore and Chennai for their enthusiasm and all that.
As he rattled out prelim answers one by one, we noticed how he was mercilessly tripping on all and sundry, being very sarcastic at times, sometimes being very acerbic and downright mean, and I actually loved watching him do that. It was like Barney the purple dinosaur having metamorphozed into Krusty the Clown all at once, and Manaswing and I were laughing our guts out as he demolished enthusiastic answer givers, while sometimes being nice to junta and giving them additional prizes. Womens who gave answers in the audience were singled out to be bladed royally.
Once all the audience prelim prizes had been given away, we found out that our score of 28 stood a fighting chance because stud-level teams like NED (
Back into the hall, Derek started putting team names that made it to the finals along with respective scores, and turned out that we had made it too. The worst part was that he said our team name was ‘Thigh Sky something’ which pissed me off, and I made it a point to correct him when we were introducing ourselves. Sai, Manaswing and I were mistaken for a college team (hehehe) and he kidded around with me asking me about my ‘interesting hairstyle’ after which I spoke about how I use pantene shampoo and conditioner for my hair.
NED qualified too, as did six other teams, and the quiz began in earnest. In the first three rounds, we hadn’t opened our account. But with some really atrocious answers, coupled with Derek calling me pantene boy, we did provide some entertainment to the crowd. It was in the audio round that we somehow, out of sheer blind luck, answered three questions that got us 30 points and we stayed in the quiz as the teams placed seventh and eighth were eliminated. NED was one of them, though they had put two amazing cracks, including how the US of A was the state was the one that had the largest tiger population, but in the zoos. Full respect to the team.
In subsequent other rounds, we somehow managed to stay just so that our head remained above the water, as we ended up being among the last four teams on stage. With surprise cries of ‘Dude!!! We are still here!!’ each time some or the other team had to exit stage, it was quite cool to be where we were. With some random guess-work, including one that I am proud of (Muggle being one of two words celebrating its tenth anniversary inclusion into the OED), we somehow managed to come third from nowhere.
Derek kept calling us ‘The Crows’, as we ended up giving that answer for the bird with the largest population on the face f the earth, though it was an obvious chicken, with a population of 52 billion. Our brain-fart moments were as great as our random cracks, and that balance made the audience love us all the more.
Derek specially took great pleasure in making fun of us at every possible moment, and our comeback only added fuel to his taunts towards us, which didn’t offend us one bit, but in fact made us laugh like dumbfucks all that much more!
Swami and his team, QED, from Chennai won the quiz and WWW comprising of a Mom, her son and her niece (someone who knew Kasper Schmichel of Man City) came second. Swami, who I had heard truckloads about, but hadn’t seen in action was such a God. The most notable crack I can recall of his was his defining ‘Medial Capitals’ (the E in John McEnroe).
With quite a lot of arbit questions in the quiz, including a lexical connect showing Ayn Rand and the south African currency Rand, there was some general disagreement among the hardcore quizzers who labelled it a ‘Derek level quiz’. I for one was pleased as punch at having got 3K worth of gift coupons from Landmark, combined with some decent respect from the crowd. Cute chicks don’t come for KQA quizzes where the Gods are in action, though they do show up for Landmark level quizzes where arbit junta can do well enough to garner a third place.
None of the cute chicks did come and put conversation however. Such is life. In any case, a fun-filled maiden podium finish at a Bangalore quiz was, for me, a landmark achievement.
I hope this (probable) return to form thing might help me get more involved in the KQA, for I would love to quiz again after engineering college, and do decently enough to be happy about it.