The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Yet another mind-boggler from IIT-Madras

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 05, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Yet another mind-boggler from IIT-Madras

Sudhish Kamath

This year's edition of the IIT Madras Open Quiz was a tough one

HAT-TRICK: Q.E.D with the cheque for the third year in a row at the IIT Madras Open Quiz 2005. Also seen are V.G.Idichandy, Dean of Students (extreme left), and A.K.Pattabiraman from TCS, Chennai (second from right). — Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

CHENNAI: : The junta at IIT came up with yet another mind-boggler.

This year's edition of the IIT Madras Open Quiz was a tough one to crack even for the professionals who totally drowned themselves in the challenge. Even those who lost seemed to have relished the experience at the Students Activity Centre.

And for the third year in a row, the city's own team `Q.E.D' (consisting of Samanth Subramanian, Swami, Gopal Kidao and Rajiv Rai) came first, beating Bangalore's `We are like this wonly' (Ochintya, Anushtup Dutta, Kiran Vijaykumar and Sathyajit Chetri) for the third consecutive time. `The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Behind,' also from Bangalore (comprising of Mukunth, Tejaswi Udupa, Rajat and Ganja) finished third.

The real heroes of the day, however, were the quizmasters: 10G, Chin, BoFi, RG and Cindy, alter-egos of IITians Rohit Bhat, Chinmay Hegde, Siddhartha Banerjee, Rahul Raghavan and Subramanya, who ensured that the audience were thoroughly entertained with their choice of questions and brain-ticklers.

Longest round

The longest connect question round, comprising of 26 different visuals, had every single person in the audience completely stumped, with the common theme running throughout being elements of flags of different countries.

And the Google Earth round, (the distinct influence of Google throughout was promptly acknowledged by the quizmasters) where the quizzers had to identify places from the satellite images, contributed to the excitement quotient in the hall.

The long drawn battle between eight finalists was about two and a half hours long, but made for an incredibly fulfilling evening for the quizzers.

"We've had over 1500 people turning up this year and 326 teams in the prelims, with teams from Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad," an absolutely delighted Naresh, the co-ordinator for the open quiz, informs us.

Earlier, at the end of the prelims, prizes for the best school teams were announced. Vidya Mandir came first and the teams from P.S. Senior Secondary School took home the second and third prizes. CTS won the best corporate team and the girls from WCC were adjudged the best all-girls team. The best team name went to `Anything but 49/51!'

The sponsors TCS and MaFoi Academy ensured plenty of goodies for the winners and even people in the audience went home with prizes from Reebok and Music World. For Prof. Idichandy, Dean of Students, who distributed the prizes, the action has just begun.

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