• InQUIZitive????
  
  

August 15 is Independence day for India but for Chennai it also means the largest open quiz of the city "Landmark Quiz".I knew that if i am there in the city i had to be there come what may even if the venue is 1hr 20 mins travel from my place.Chennai is a land of Quiz loving ppl. If u need a proof u shld have witnessed the crowd at the huge hall that was enthralled by the volley of questions thrown by Derek O Brein.The chief guest of the evening was Vikram Chandra who was in town for the release of his book "Sacred Games"

My team partners were my office colleagues but not from he same project, Ankurnath( he is a keen quizzer n was also my partnerto the Tata Crucible Biz Quiz that was held 3 weeks b4) and Elavarsan ( i met him at the quiz venue).

The prelims had 40 questions. It being an open quiz , the questions catered to all age group and hand picked from varied fields of interest.

The plummest lot of all the q were

- one that dealt with cockroach( q: the animal that has retained its structure for 200 million years)

-one that required to identify the voice of Monty Panesar.

- the country that scored the highest no of goals in FIFA finals - Brazil

the toughest questions were

- one that had a list of non- comprehensible collection of alphabets to form 12 words which turned out to be 12 finches that were under Darwin ( now who is bothered abt these birds)

- connect : Leonardo da vinci, a dog in a basket, an indian lady with a beautiful long hair .

Try exercising ur grey cells for a while, i m not going to give out the ans for this

There were few that gave out surprising infos like

- Hitler was a landscape artist!!! b4 becoming what he is know famous for.

- Its Sears Tower n not Petronas tower that has the largest commercially occupied floors.

- the pic of Florence Nightingale in a totally different angle (w/o a lamp)

I liked this one q which was v well cracked by Ankur

- Which organization have members who work as boss, under-boss, soldier, under-soldier - MAFIA

n as usual there was a list of q that makes u scream "how did i miss this!!!"
- The book cover of "Indian Summers" with the pic of tha author,John Wright missing

- the most commonly used English noun acc to Oxford- time

- pink ribbon symbolizing - breast cancer (considering the fact that it was also the week of "Spreading Awareness abt Breastfeeding")

The cut off was 23.5 n 7 out of the 8 teams on the dias had this score.The IIT team "No questions asked" had a clear lead of 25 pts due to their prelims score but they cldnt capitalise on it n finished third at the end of the day.

The finals had many superb questions which were even more superbly cracked by the teams.I cant recollect many but few of my favorites were:

1) 1 square feet of this weighs exactly 205 gm - the cloth from which the Indian flag is made

2) Connect Architect Louis Blank, Anna in the book Anna Karenina, Arshad Warzi in Sehar - all of them died in railway station.

3) Whom did the English press dub as "Abnominal noman" - Charles deGaulle for preventing Britain from entering the European union.

well the list is endless... For further details join the Yahoo "Quizkreig" group n c my post.

The best moment of the evening was when a 60+ aged man from the audience came up to the stage to collect his gift for answering a question that was thrown to the audience n amidst a group of we so called future of India who r so cynical abt our future he proudly said that "the country has developed v well n in the right track". The best part was yet to come, when we got to know that his son, Swami was among those in the podium n eventually his team "QED" emerged the Winner for the 2006 edition.

To sum up it was a gr8 evening ( now this is an understatement).

P.S : the ans to the connect q is "parachute" now try connecting ;-)