The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : TCS-IIT Madras Open Quiz makes holiday enriching

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Thursday, Oct 04, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

TCS-IIT Madras Open Quiz makes holiday enriching

Staff Reporter

Eight teams made it to the finals of the fifth edition

— Photo: S. S. Kumar

PREPARING THEMSELVES: Participants at the preliminary round of TCS -IIT Madras Open Quiz 2007 held on Tuesday.

CHENNAI: For some of the popular quizzers in the city, every national holiday seems to mean more victory and more prize money. On Independence Day, they won the Landmark quiz.

On Gandhi Jayanthi, some of them reorganised themselves into different teams and won the first two places in ‘TCS-IIT Madras Open Quiz’ here on Tuesday. From nearly 1,300 participants in the preliminary round, eight teams, each of four, made it to the finals of the fifth edition of the quiz.

The winning team that called itself ‘Mama, Machan, Maapillai, Makku’ was visibly thrilled after breaking the monopoly that team ‘QED’ enjoyed in the last four editions. L. Ramkumar, N. Srinivasan, V. V. Ramanan and Sumanth Srivatsan bagged the first place and Rs.20,000 as prize money.

Introducing members of the ‘QED’, they said, “We are all the usual suspects!” The ‘QED’ comprised G. Swaminathan, Rajen Prabhu, Gopal Kidao and R. Jayakanthan. The preliminary rounds began at about 2 p.m. and the final ended at about quarter-to-eight.

After nearly six hours of quizzing at the Student Activity Centre at IIT-Madras, the audience dispersed, still discussing a question.

A member of the organising team of the quiz said there were nine quiz masters — eight of them students, and one professor.

“Which is the only script that is written from right to left, but read in the opposite manner?” When the quiz master posed this question, little did the audience expect one of the teams to crack it, especially after a few predictable guesses were made and declared wrong.

But one team did, and got the answer — Braille — winning themselves and the quiz master a good round of applause.

Prizes were given in many categories, including ‘best school team’ that went to Vidya Mandir, P.S.Senior Secondary School and Sankara Senior Secondary School, ‘Best female team’ and ‘Best corporate team’.

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