Quizzing @ Kochi !!!

Really, Bad luck.

For the last two days….we were on preparation and enjoying the world of IT Quiz. At Ernakulum, Tata Consultancy services IT Wiz 2006 was held at Vinayaka Kalyana Mandapam, Kadavanthara, Cochin. Me and my companion, Rahul Anand being a team, participated in TCS IT Wiz 2006.

We had quarter yearly examination going on for the past one week and I was in a hurry. I just found th dtails of the quiz during one exam day and forwarded an application. We didn’t get any time to do preparation for quiz due to exams. 22nd was a day just after exam ended, we started collecting some data…

We setout to Ernakulum afternoon. It was a nice train journey..and we reached there by 9.30 pm. We had arranged stay at Sikshak Bhavan. That was fine. But Rahul and me really got in trouble due to infinite mosquito attacks !!. On very next morning, 23rd saturday, We moved to Vinayaka Kalyana mandapam for participating in Quiz. It was a huge auditorium and we saw lots of students ganged there. We didn’t take any notes inside the auditorium and we scribbled about some intersting bytes. The Quiz started at 12.30 pm, TCS introduced our quiz master ‘Giri Balasubrahmanium’ aka Pick Brain. He is one of the top quiz masters in India. He introduced about the rules of the Quiz. It was the Ist time we knew about the quiz and we participated in the quiz. and we are on 12th class.. hence its our last chance too. For us, it is first and last chance.

The Quiz had two selection criterias. Ist one was a preliminary round. Six teams of 500 teams are selected on this. All six finalists will receive mega prizes. Then the team who score Ist will be sent to Mumbai for national finals. Ist session of Quiz was a preliminary round. There was almost 500 teams all over from kerala. Most guyz were from Trivandrum and Ernakulaum. Prelim was a list of 20 questions and we answered 16 out of them correctly. We got dissapointed about three of wrong answers. If we had taken those prepared notes inside the hall, we definite;y will be able to answer those !!. The questions were: Who is the CEO of HP (I forgot the name and was shocked ), Who owns the trademark of ‘Ethernet’?. Bull shit.

We were the team coming most farthest from Ernakulum. After prelims, we had our lunch arranged by TCS IT Wiz team. After that we were waiting for the announcement of finalist list. Our quizmaster came to the stage. He announced about the prizes for the finalists. Then…he announced our name -‘Sarath Lakshman’ and ‘Rahul Anand’ - “Bad luck”. We were out from final list. If we hads scored one more point, definitely we will be on the stage, Quizmaster remarked. Just one point made us to looose.. finalist rank. We Scored 7th place among 500 participant teams. What can we do ??? the real bad luck.

There were so many big shots (Competeting schools) who has been competiting for the past years.. I felt they were dominating there. Teachers and school were encouraging them and they trained students to win the quiz. Most sad thing about us :- Our school didn’t show any interest on the Quiz and didn’t get any sort of encouragement or support……… Finally on the TCS IT Wiz 2006, ‘Pallikoodam’ won the Ist place.

After the quiz, we moved towards a cinema theature and watched the movie ‘The DON’. The film was not fare. Then we moved to our lodge and packed our stuffs for coming back. We moved to Ekm north railwaystation. Rahul and me became busy in discussing about comics. He is a guy interested about physics in comics. He exaplained me some physics about charactors like X-men, superman,Phantom etc.. At 12.00 pm, our train, Malabar express arrived. We reached Mahe by 5.40 am today… The quiz was nice.

But We missed it.