Three quizzes. Loads of Cadbury’s Gift Boxes as audience prizes. Good food. A press conference. Yes, I meant press conference, the kind with bright lights going off in your face and questions being asked. Not the one with the impatient washermen. And the famed Big Basu. Definitely a day to remember.

Arul Mani’s Science and Tech Quiz was the most engaging scientific trip ever! We spent some time talking, and man, is he god or what…

Somewhere down the line, I learnt that he was a major comics/crime-fiction/sci-fi buff. Heh heh heh.

Saw a little more of the IIM campus today. The quizzes were being held in the new campus, which is quite far from the city. Most of the construction is complete, and the first-year students have classes going on here. The second-year students are too addicted to the LAN in the old campus, and because the Intranet hasn’t been set up in the new hostels, they haven’t moved yet. The campus is atop a hill, kind of resembles REC Silchar minus the lakes.

The two quizzes in the morning were chill-out sessions for me. The audience prizes were HUGE boxes of chocolates and since I was in the first row and since the guy holding the boxes was sitting next to me, there was this constant stream of chocolate boxes our way. I never thought I would get tired of hogging Cadbury’s chocolates, apparently I thought wrong.

Anil and his team won three quizzes, by the way. Way to go, dude!

Gautam Ghosh’s quiz was ok, standard calcutta fare, not exactly my cup of tea. Enjoyed some bits of it, loathed some parts.

At about five, the Lone Wolf and Science/Tech quizzes are over. I am sitting there talking to Arul when BAM! Suki comes along with this bald guy and says “This is Satyajit Chetri” and I think it’s some sponsor or maybe the Principal and then realise that oh gosh this is him. He looked pretty different, you know. And the booming voice we hear on TV is obviously something he turns on along with the spotlight and the cameras. True showmanship. But the charm, the smile is always there. You can never catch him off his guard.

We are then hustled onto the podium for the “press conference”. Most of the time, it’s Le Basu answering questions (including an awful one comparing his accent with Derek O’Brien’s, the reporter sure deserved a Razzie for this one…)and fielding the rest to Gautam Ghosh. Arun and I mumble politely every time we’re asked something ( which is not too frequently) and then somebody asks something about comparing quizzers of bygone days with the quizzers of today, and I find the mike shoved towards me ( very politely, of course ) and I blabber something that sounds very asinine when I think about it now. I get a lot of polite applause, of course. Very Diplomatic, these IIM people.

Anyways, I also corrected Gautam Ghosh’s comment about Nihilanth being the first Quiz Festival in India. I did remember to credit RVCE’s Under The Peepul Tree and then went ahead and mentioned Trivium. However, I did say that Nihilanth was the best Quiz Fest I have been to so far. Which is, frankly, true.

The General Quiz at the end went off quite well, with slight technical hitches. it was conducted in the open-air theatre and was followed by a sumptous dinner. Good-byes ( and a lot of business cards) were exchanged. Note to myself: Next time, get more freakin’ cards along, dumbo.

I leave for Hyderabad tomorrow. I will miss Sayaji Grande. I wish I had a little space in my tummy to order and eat a Chicken Stroganoff now.

It seems Arul, me and Gautam Ghosh have the same flight to Mumbai. Arul says he knows a shop in Bandra that sells pretty good books. Aah.

And everyone was still praising my quiz. I actually had a guy come to me and ask about tips on becoming a Quizmaster. I actually engaged in lively banter with Siddharth Basu. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

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.