Sunday, August 16, 2009

Landmark Quiz ‘09

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It was August 15th and India’s 63rd Independence Day. As with every year, the evening was consumed by the 18th edition of India’s largest open quiz: The Landmark Quiz Competition. The prelims were set to start at 2.30 P.M. The turnout was huge once more. Almost every seat in Music Academy was taken. It is not for nothing that Chennai is the quizzing capital of India and quiz enthusiasts turned out in large numbers to confirm that. If that was not enough proof, the quality of quizzing settled the matter beyond doubt.

The prelims had an interesting set of 40 questions, starting with the National Anthem rendering by the grandma granddaughter pair of Nithyashree and Late. D.k. Pattamal and closing with a question on Vikram crooning for Kanthasaamy. Try these questions

What is a bunch of bananas called? or What does the M stand for in M.R. Radha and M.L. Vasanthakumari.

You should be able to get the full list of questions on www.quizzing.in site in a short while.

The top 8 teams qualified for the Chennai finals. The team calling themselves No Enthu da won the Regional round and were crowned Chennai champions. They qualified for the National finals along with the team finishing runners up The Dhukkan Chargers.

The National Finals was another mouth-watering fare with the quiz master Dr. Navin Jayakumar raising the bar on the diffficulty of the questions and teams doing brilliantly to keep up with it. Though the teams for the national finals had qualified from three other cities, Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore, the teams comprised mostly of quizzers from Chennai. The team comprising of V.V. Ramana, Swamy and Samanth called Q.E.D walked home with the top laurels of the evening but not before they were given a run for their money by the team from Bangalore “We are like that only.” It was so close that the winner had to be decided by a tie-breaker.

Overall it was a well spent evening of quizzing and we all returned home having acquired a bit more power because “Knowledge is Power”.

4 comments:

  1. same old faces and teams making it to the finals- requested to come backstage after the prelims (I guess as I wasnt there).

    Why is it that only when Derek O'Brien conducts the quiz do we see some new faces, as well as the top 30 scorers declared and the finalists announced in the process.

    It will truly be a celebration of the independence day when the "Open" quizzes are truly thrown open.

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  2. Hey Vikram,

    I agree with one of your points. I think they should be a bit more transparent on how much the cut-off is and the scores of atleast the 8 teams who make it to the finals. On the question of new faces, I dont think your observation is entirely true. As an example, Derek did the quiz in 2006 and QED were the winners back then.

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  3. Hey no doubt QED and the other qualifying teams were good and deserving - I am sure the victors would be happy to know its a true victory when its a fair playing ground (like QED in 2006)

    The statistics mentioned 700 odd teams at prelims - how easy would it be to correct 40 answers each, tabulate them, and then sort them in order? how long would it take before the answers should have been announced

    this tells you how it was done...

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  4. I wish Landmark and Navin do a quick 5 minute documentary to show how it is done. Navin, are you listening?

    ReplyDelete