iQuizLeague

(Karthik Narayan, on behalf of the IQL team)

Every year I am part of the Madras Quiz for the last four years – all those years have been as a participant in the quiz. I eagerly waited for the day when we would get to host this coveted quiz. Sylvian Patrick shared the same thought with me last year when we teamed up for this quiz. That thought lingered, I promised Patrick that we would go on to host an OPEN quiz in the city of Chennai, if not the Madras Quiz, one of our own. Well, we did the India Quiz in January this year, and now when I asked Vincent, he was more than happy to let us do it.

Ever since we got the okay from Mylapore Times to host the Madras Quiz 2009, all of us at the IQL were quite excited. This is a quiz we have grown up on, have taken so many potshots at and most importantly, something close to our hearts and where we play to our strengths.

All of us got going and started compiling questions over the last 40 days or so. In the beginning it was easy; we had to just keep the questions rolling over and consolidate it as a database. But as we moved on, exchanged notes and compared our database with the questions that had already been asked, we realized our tasks had not even begun. There were so many questions that had been asked in previous editions and we could not afford to repeat questions at all.

The grueling strategy of eliminating repeated ones and making new questions started all over again, with less than a month to go. Every week all of us met and every time we grunted when told some of our questions had already been asked!!

The challenge did not stop there. Having been part of 4 of the first 5 editions of the Madras Quiz, we had a feel of the level and diversity of the participants – ranging from school going geniuses to aging yet agile sharp-shooters. These were people who had varying interests – from serial and soaps to Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, were crazy about cricket and kaapi yet spoke in American accents at work. So we wanted to cater to all of them, yet make it answerable by all. I thought we did quite well, considering we all have our day-jobs all through the week and all the time we got was during the weekend.

In between missing great Vijayakanth’s latest movies and making unusual excuses to our families for skipping lunches and dinners, we endlessly worked on our PC’s even on weekends and put up the extensive hours of research that showed up in our questions. We had our eureka moments that left us on a high, but the job was not done until we had covered all the topics. So we published a self-prescribed list of topics to ensure we had questions to cover each topic. Now we sit back and wonder how we did it all – ahh, leisure is now an available commodity that’s become cheaper again.

For a change, we got all the questions done well ahead of the quiz itself. We had quite a nightmare on the last day of the India Quiz, plugging questions into the quiz at the very last minute.

(To be concluded)

Prelims questions are attached below:

(Review of the Madras Quiz 2009 hosted by IQL By Subhashree Srinivasan)

Hey KN, I can’t find anyone at P.S. school”, I yelled over the phone and stretched my neck to find some signs of activity.

“Which P.S. school did you land yourself at?? Senior or Higher??”, he asked calmly.

“What??! There are two P.S. schools at Mylapore??”

Irony about the conversation. I was one of the participants at MADRAS CITY QUIZ- ellam about our singara Chennai. Yenna kodume sir ithu.

After troubling my friend for the right directions, I reached the right venue-P.S. Secondary School, Mylapore, to find the auditorium almost full and bustling with activity. Second irony about the quiz- there were equal number of people on stage as there were in participants. Owing to my geography IQ and ignorance, I decided not to participate, but curiosity prevailed and I found a random team mate.

The prelims started at 2 p.m. and consisted of 30 questions. For a person new to quizzing, it was a good set of questions- few easy ones, few brilliant ones and the rest were moderate level. There were some issues during the prelims – especially one of the audios on PB Srinivoss was not clear, and the visual on Hotel Saravana Bhavan was not clear enough.

I was kind of happy with our performance. But, yes, you guessed it; it was short-lived when the correction started. I happened to get JK and his partner’s answer sheet which lodged an extra bit of inferior complexity in me. To be technically right; our rights were equal to their wrongs. The prelims had quite a number of high scores and the top six were picked along with best school and ladies team.

The highest score was 27, and the other scores of the teams that made it on stage were 25, 25, 22, 22 and 22 respectively. Quizmaster Sylvian Patrick announced this and also read out the teams that just missed out by one point!! Tough luck, guys!! The final 6 teams on stage, would have been familiar names and faces to you if you are a regular quizzer in these parts.

And so the stage was set.

Totally there were 5 rounds – round one was a textual round, a mix of everything on Old Madras to current Chennai, containing 20 questions on infinite bounds. There were two rounds with a central theme to be identified – rounds 2 and 4. All teams cracked the theme easily. Ramana and Ramkumar, the defending champions appeared rather quiet. The last round was an anti-clockwise round with 20 questions. The format was a whiff of fresh air, but some of the questions in the finals were rather long to read – perhaps something for the IQL team to work on  in the future. The teams cracked most of the questions put to them, except in the third round (movie round) where they were unable to hit the right answers for almost all the questions.

At times it seemed like the quiz master was in a bit of a hurry, reading the questions at express pace as though he had an auto meter bill to contend with. .

To the credit of the entire organizing team, they started and finished on time. There were some little glitches, though one felt that the questions in the finals were too tough and not really aimed at the “true chennaiites” who know their history as well as their filter kaapi  – and those who like to soak up the latest news like their ponvandu soap.

This was a quiz that had people of all ages including a mami in her 60s who knew the answerrs to a couple of questions in the finals – the quiz team had to literally shush her from blurting them out before the teams on stage could.

A new script was written this year – the regulars at Madras Quiz know that Ramana and Ramkumar Shankar have been the defending champions over a couple of years now, but from literally nowhere, the team of Jayakanthan and Alagarsamy blasted their way through the finals. My heart went out to runners up Rajaram and Joshi,  when I heard that they had travelled all the way from the Gulf to participate  – apparently they  have made it each year  to the Landmark and Madras Quiz over the last few years; particularly at Madras Quiz, they have been runners-up on a few occasions without getting the coveted title. This year too! The other four teams were less than half the scores of the winner and runners-up, so you can understand that it was dominated by two of them.

I have attended only two of the Madras Quiz editions (2008 and 2009), I am not any “quizzer” as you call it, but found this quiz fresher and more enjoyable than the previous ones. When the quiz came to an end; we all left for our places – wiser and with better ideas for the next quiz. This is a big event for us; as a team and a quizzing group.

The destination is clear and we will be there someday. (Do I sound like a martyr??!!)

P.S; Congrats to the entire IQL team for putting up a great show at the Madras Quiz 2009. Very special thanks to Mrs.Raji Muthukrishnan for her wonderful questions. The “brilliance” of her questions was evident from the response from the audience.