So it’s over.

I believe mine was the quiz with the longest prelims – 42 questions in all, 22 dries, 11 visuals and 9 audio – which took a far longer time than it should have because of technical glitches that creep in at every quiz. Like, the projector didn’t start, and then the speakers didn’t work ( or rather, they did work in a druggie mode, with a very high-pitched sound that crept in along with the music being played ) Then another problem happened to be the scarcity of xeroxes of question-papers – which resulted in my reading out questions 16-22. And, boy oh boy, my longest questions were part of the prelims, only so that I wouldn’t have to read ’em out.

But it went well, all of it. Gautam Ghosh scared me, when he took a look at the question paper and said – “This is way too tough.” And then I told him some of the answers and he was pretty happy, because they weren’t as oddball as he had thought. And after the prelims, when I started reading out the answers, the response was …awesome. All the teams seemed to get quite a lot of answers.

In a nutshell, then, it was a good quiz. Sure, there were people who came and said that they had been to lots of quizzes before, but none as good as this one( to which I could just give a silly grin and go “purrrrr” in my head), and there were some who wanted me to conduct quizzes at their respective institutes ( I controlled myself from asking “how much are your paying?”, too much enthu is not good ), but there was also Dhaaji, who absolutely refused to call me to be the QM for any of the IIMB quizzes because I had given a team 10 points for indentifying a band singing Strawberry Fields as the Beatles. Which, I admit, was a mistake I made today, the only one, to be precise.

There were loads of unasked questions – dries, visuals and audio. The special round I had thought of, called “One Giant Leap” ( eight topics, three questions for each topic, +1, +3, +5 points for a hop, a skip, or a jump question ) was also put on hold – all because there was no time, and at some part of it, my back started aching real bad, and I started to get the feeling I was stretching things too much.

Later, somebody told me that I could have extended it by two hours and they would have sat through it.

Hmm, this is doing wonders for my confidence.

Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.