The 'interesting' Freshers' Quiz

Before I begin on this post, a few clarifications, I feel, are due.

Hej! is a greeting commonly used in Sweden and on blogs whose authors have recently read Going Loco by Lynne Truss.
I am fully aware of the fact that most of the comments to the previous post do not make any sense. I would do something about them, but there are too many, and I am too tired to reply to each one of them. We shall, for now, assume that replying to only the relevant ones is a course of action that does not occur to me. I shall choose, therefore, as of now, to ignore them.
I have, as some of the more perceptive people following the progress of this blog would have noticed, not posted in 10 days. I have also not, as some of you would know, replied to any mails during this period. A few of you, who happen to share the common misfortune of having me on your MSN or Yahoo Messenger Contact Lists would have also noticed, or so I like to believe, my 10-day long absence.
I have been, in short, online precisely zero times in the last 10 days. I have been hibernating. And I have 21 unanswered and mostly pointless comments, and 84 new mails on my Yahoo account to show of it.
Why I have been away for 10 days is a topic I shall not go into now, for I have no time to explain. It is a thrilling tale. I wish to do it justice.

I shall therefore, start where I left off. A lot has happened in the past 10 days that I wish to document on this blog. Whose Life? shall, therefore, during the coming week, be written in the past-tense. I shall try to return to the present as soon as possible. Leaving senseless comments, however, shall only delay my recovery.

The Freshers' Quiz was, as I pointed out earlier, interesting. Interesting because of the large contrasts. Contrasts in the quality of competition. Contrasts in the quality of questions. Contrasts in the degree of organization. And very significantly, although it might not seem so important to most people, contrasts in the attitude of the audience. I shall not be going into all these contrasts in detail in the course of this post. They were, nonetheless, very apparent.

The competition was, to be quite frank, poor. Two or three people did stand out, and stand out well, but the general level of the quiz left a lot to be desired. Team Shiwalik was good, primarily because of, from what I hear, Anurag Sud. Team Satpura, which really impressed, especially in the prelims, also had a couple of very good quizzers. Vindhyanchal's freshers, I thought, were a distant third. The fact that they bagged the 2nd spot shows, once again, how important placing and luck is in an infinite-bounds quiz. Karakoram and Jwalamukhi, the other two teams who were a part of the final five, were, at least on both days in question (prelims and finals), very ordinary. The fact that they made it through the prelims says a lot about the level of the quiz. A couple of freshers from Jwala I talked to on the days preceding the event seem to have some potential, but that doesn't seem to stop them from passing sitters. To Kara's credit, they did not pass a single question. They came up with the most ridiculous answers, but they did not pass. Mr. Prabhpal Singh Grewal insists he was instrumental in making them behave the way they did. Mr. Prabhpal Singh Grewal is a fascinating man.

Moving on to the questions. They were worse. And they played no small part in making the quiz as ordinary as it was. Most of them were based on senseless trivia. The one's that weren't were ridiculously simple. And the ones that weren't either were copied verbatim from Quiznet. Come to think about it, even most of the trivia-based and the absurdly-simple questions were, in fact, copied verbatim from Quiznet. There were a few wonderful, original and insightful questions, but they were rare, and their brilliance was completely overshadowed due to all the poor ones.
I must, however, mention that Mr. Aditya Meduri (excellent quizzer, commonly referred to as Meduri, more commonly as Khajury) from Aravalli came up with a few extraordinary questions, and no doubt must be cast on his abilities, for almost all of his questions fitted neatly into the original, insightful and wonderful category. Mr. Arpit Nanda (I hope I have the surname right), from Karakoram, also came up with a few amazing questions, with a little help, I believe, from Mr. Amandeep Singh.

The organization was good, but not as good as it was last year. I guess it had a lot to do with the time restraints, and the newly put into place, ridiculous interaction-period rules. The quiz did seem a bit hurried towards the later part, especially because it had moved at so leisurely a pace in the beginning (what with everybody passing and nobody ready to answer), but a well-deserved round of applause for Bala for putting together as good a show as he could. Couldn't have done much about the questions and the competition, could he?

The audience was awful. It couldn't even have been called an audience during the prelims. There were just a handful of isolated groups scattered around the hall, and one could just about sight one such group if only one possessed a pair of binoculars. Though there were a few more people present during the finals, they didn't do much else besides whistling loudly when a picture of Kylie Minogue was briefly flashed on the screen during one of the Audio-Visual questions. And this at the height of the interaction period, when pro-hostel cheering is supposed to be of paramount importance. Disappointing. Terribly disappointing.

That about wraps it up as far as the freshers' quiz is concerned. Bad, but could have been worse.

And since I haven't said this on my blog before, I shall say it now. MEP 201 sucks. All the teachers are sicksadistic bastards. And they use fresh wax on the slanting tables before each class to make them as slippery as possible. They shall rot in hell. Every last one of 'em.