Times Fundamental Quiz: Now don’t ask…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Headshot, It's My Life, Quizzing
30th of Oct, a day for which I was waiting for nearly a month finally came on the very same day! (What a dumb statement to begin a post with..!!) First, something for the uninitiated:
What is Times Fundamental..?? (For Dummies)
Times of India, as school kids might be knowing, sells its newspapers in schools belonging to various cities of India by the brand (read excuse) NIE, Newspaper In Education. So these guys invite all their subscribee schools, which includes almost all the private ones to a GRAND quizzing show hosted by Derek O’ Brien and Associates. Like every year, this year too, they held one of the largest quizzes to ever hit Delhi.
Rulez of the Game -
Pretty simple, a written round of 30 questions, with the top six teams going up the stage with Derek and the next 14 teams being certified achievers. But then, the catch is that each school could send in only one team to represent itself there. An anti-DPS initiative!
Our Team -
Me, Sambit and Sanket again, reteaming after the Columban Open. It was quite a problem to decide the team for ourselves, as we have multiple talented blokes in our quiz club. Since our team entirely consisted of CBQC-Finalists, so we dreamed of going up there on the stage, Derek recognizing us, or we telling it to the whole wide Siri Fort Auditorium that we were winners in the past!
Even the native KPS team wanted to go, but with a little bit of negotiation and understanding shown by our wonderful Principal, we finally were approved through.
The Experience: From KPS to Home…
This time however, the KPS people couldn’t actually arrange for an imported vehicle from their kind relatives, so we had resort to one of the worst pieces of automotive engineering, the auto-rickshaw. Not only that its expensive, and gives sucky fuel economy, but also is very very low on performance. Ours almost stopped at one of the fly-overs/over-bridges. To add to that, the drivers prefer running it on Kerosene at times instead of the fractionally expensive CNG, that degrades its performance even more. So even on an empty road, the auto-rickshaw is capable of getting you late to quizzes about which you can’t do šhìt!
Before I wander away too far from the topic, lemme get back to it. (another dumb statement!) We did luckily manage to reach on time and get into this massive auditorium custom built for quizzes like these. The setup simply reminded me of the Cadbury Bournvita Quiz Contest one… typical Derek O’ Brien and Associates. Well, the prelims were conducted by some golu-molu guy, which made me construct a theory on connecting the future of the quizzing career with the person’s physique.
Just like all Fundamental Prelims, and all Derek O’ Brien Quizzes, this was an astoundingly easy paper making the cut-offs for the finals really really high. There is absolutely no room for error in such quizzes, and silly mistakes and bad guessing always makes you feel like suiciding. The venue too was just perfect, the Siri Fort is furlong away from the auditorium, and most quizzers coming to the event may consider that as an ideal point to end it all. Although I had other plans, I thought, when I am destined to have a such an end, why not shift that end after losing the TCS?
The paper can be downloaded by clicking here.
Anyway, the quiz prelims were bloody easy with we getting 23 questions right out of the 30. That includes identifying Neil Nitin Mukesh, the name of the country featuring a Hindu temple, and other toughies. What it didn’t include, was the second largest state of India. We changed the answer multiple times here. We had a feud between Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh here. Just look at the map yourself, they do infact appear pretty much the same size. Finally, we chanted “Jai Maharashta” to shout a resounding “Shìt!” while the answers were announced. A similar confusion occurred between V.V.Giri and Zakir Hussain on being the oldest President of the country. Guesswork was terrible! And we finally, we didn’t even make it to the top 20 with a score 23 being the last position.
Almost every school seemed to have come there. I felt sooo embarrassed about the fact that quite a few of the people there do know me and have seen me before. Also, it feels as if someone formatted your entire hard drive of invaluable files when you watch big dreams, strongly hope to get it alive and finally lose it all! I know I have tons of quizzes to give int eh future, but still, I really wanted to go up there on stage and flaunt the fact that we are an all BQC finalist team. And it felt so dumb that an all BQC finalist team did not qualify there. Call it bad luck, call it bad decisions, and there isn’t a single bloody question in there for which we didn’t have a correct answer in mind.
Before we even came here, a KPS native intra team selection was held and they were all set to go. Just a few weeks before the quiz, we approached the Principal to allow us to go there. We told her about how we have done in quizzes in the past and how we did in quizzes at Delhi and she was quite keen on sending us. Now I feel really sorry for those KPS kids who couldn’t go. We had a heavy discussion amongst ourselves on the team composition of the quiz. (the density of quality students is exceptionally high at FIITJEE Pinnacle!) I really don’t know how many swear words swept across their mind when they saw the prelims paper and heard the story of ours tanking big time there…
Finals
Enough of ranting now. Readers, please understand that I do require someone to hear all these things. It makes me feel better after a disappointing time. I said to myself, “no WARP ‘06 attack this time buddy, just think that you are watching a BQC Episode in an IMAX theatre.”
Well that didn’t help a bit, and it terribly turned out to be the quiz of my nightmares. Bloody Ðámn easy finals. Perhaps this particular nature of DoBA (Derek O’ Brien and Associates) quizzes is what makes some people speculate that Derek is no good of a quizmaster. Anyway, good quizmaster or not, Derek is a brilliant MC. (For KPS students, MC actually means Master of Ceremonies, thats actually a commonly used term) He is one guy who can simply create interest amongst everyone, whether it is the uninterested teachers, dumb kids coming in as cheerleaders. Its an awful lot of fun to see him “Jhand-ing” someone for a crime like walking across the path in front of the stage while the quiz is going on or even prompting the answer.
Well the theme of the finals was Twenty20 Cricket and even Derek came dressed in the Indian Cricket Team gear. Although there were only a handful of questions on cricket there, the names of the rounds were all rip offs of cricket terminologies, Toss Up for example was the Agree/Disagree round. Chuck De! India soundtracks boomed across the auditorium with powerful and brilliant sounding JBL acoustics and then those songs were actually sounding good there.
Derek got the entire audience moving and he himself too was as mobile as an isolated atom in a vacuum chamber up there on stage. He jumping, dancing and extremely energetic there. (Ðámn, I sooo much wanted to be there!) He had everyone waving and clapping in the audio rounds and then the guests present there were eminent ones too… with Manpreet Kaur, one of the Miss India crown bearers. The show put up was flawless and stringently finished in time… Derek, may not be the world’s greatest quizmaster, but is an award winning MC. No one can beat him in that! And he has stayed just the same since I last saw him somewhere in the academic year of 2004-2005. Kudos to him for that!
Coming to questions, they were more of the IQ test sort of questions rather than raw GK tests. You literally had to solve puzzles on stage and make the pieces fit right. An easy thing to do to win the the coveted Fundamental tropie which came to DPS Noidea. Finally I was back home with a big sigh on the face. Disappointments? Yes. Regrets? Yes, for missing classes. Hopes? YES, for the next big event, Exun 2007.
PS- On stage, we had 4 schools from Noida and just 2 schools from Not-Noida!
Also, expect tons of rants like this one on the blog. 
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2 Responses to “Times Fundamental Quiz: Now don’t ask…”
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Vivek Nair Says:
November 25th, 2007 at 2:17 amDolt…you are sooo far behind when it comes to blogging. No Exun. No CW. And you’ll probably blog about Dynamix after the boards. Sheesh
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The Zeitgiest (Mrittunjoy) Says:
December 7th, 2007 at 8:17 amAnd no Eclat or Converge clan? Better improve…
