Rishabh Kaul's Weblog » Quiz

Birth of a star: OHT

Rishabh — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:31:50 +0000

In college, I was once the secretary of the English Language Activities Society. We were a merry bunch. Under the masquerade of a heavy literary/deb soc sounding title, we were pretty much just a group of friends who enjoyed quizzing. And most of the time that’s pretty much all we organized, save the occasional jam/scrabble/story writing contest.

For years it was debated (snigger) if these merry men (and a few women) would produce anything worthwhile based on the skill sets they acquired in this club.

After 4 years of brainstorming, I present to you their bastard child.

Over Head Transmission (or OHT- oh ech tee). [The link has our impressive bios, past quizzes and all that tosh]

We’re a young bunch of testosterone packed quizzers who provide you with original tasty quizzes. The only unoriginal part I guess is the name of the start-up, which is derived from a popular event that takes place in a desert once a year. The event’s legacy is far richer than ours.

Currently, we’re working on some cool programs to target the little ones who are still naive (or not so naive if they study in DPS RK Puram), but till then, we’re free to be summoned/commissioned to organize quizzes for your college/corporate quiz on any topic under the sun. These pay the bills.

That is all.

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

My issues with Quizzing in BITSian festivals

Rishabh — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:49:00 +0000

Oasis, BITS Pilani’s cultural festival ended less than a week ago. This will also most probably be my last Oasis as a student on campus. Of the few firsts that took place this Oasis was me winning my first Oasis Quiz. The quiz itself was quite a spectacle. Only in BITS Pilani will one find 450 odd people sitting down in an auditorium at 11 in the night writing the prelims to a quiz which would go into the wee hours of the night.

We won the quiz on the last question, despite amassing a lead of 60 points after the first 2 rounds.

Also, all the 6 teams on stage were BITS teams.

And this directly brings us to the crux of the post. For the last 4-5 years, the quizzing in Oasis and Apogee(our tech fest) has been limited to BITSian participation. Few teams form other colleges attend the fest only for the sake of the quiz. Competitions dealing with the finer arts of dancing, treasure hunting and rocking your brains out receive far diverse participation (although quizzes receive far more participation that any other event). It’s a shame because there are around 2000 people coming to Oasis from other colleges.

Now this would be fine if it weren’t for a tiny issue of community engagement. With all the 6 teams on stage belonging to a single college the average BITSian who isn’t remotely interested in quizzing has no incentive to watch the event.

As it is, quizzing is very much an outsider’s sport and take away the element of rooting for your college and you’re left with a bunch of 70-80 odd people sitting in the front seats while the masses evacuate the auditorium (with a 1400 seating capacity).

I have seen this happening with other literary events too. The biggest problem with all this is that the team spirit is lost and it becomes more about who won the quiz rather than which college did he/she belong to. It irks me to notice that a bunch of 10 girls from Gargi or LSR can cheer and show more spirit than 4000 students on campus. Come to think of it, I hardly heard any cheers from the audience when BITS’ team came runners up in Rocktaves this year.

I have no doubts that BITSian quizzers are amongst the best in North India (I have attended and won/heard of others winning enough festivals to confirm that), and as a member of the quizzing society on campus it somehow makes me wonder if this lack of diverse participation is creating a hurdle for quizzing on campus to scale up.

Last year during the Brain of BITS finals, there were 5 Pilani boys on stage along with a 6th fella who came from the Dubai campus. He gave the eventual winner, a man known by the moniker or King (or King D or Ravishing Ravi if you aren’t into the whole brevity thing) very stiff competition. BOB too came down to the last question.

So what can be done about this?

One strategy is to keep a cap on the teams that make it through on stage from a particular college, but then the flaw in this system is that there is hardly any quality non BITSian participation in terms of quizzing during Oasis. So in the unlikely case of this being implemented, the quality of the event will go down drastically.

One reason for poor outside participation is because Oasis almost always clashes with one of the IIT fests and the cheap fellows that these IITians are just end up going to each others’ fest. DU too doesn’t turn up, I am aware of some pretty good folks in DCE/NSIT/Stephens. They just don’t come. Is it the 5 hours through rural yet picturesque Haryana that prevents them from coming? I don’t know.

Why doesn’t this happen with other events such as MUN? What is it with MUN and DU colleges? I am going to have a MUN inside a well in Jhunjhunu district and I am sure I will have 12th graders from DPS RK Puram ready to sign up and dive in, ready to speak on the foreign policies of Tanzania.

Mean while, if you’re a student from any other college and is remotely interested in Quizzing, do turn up for either Apogee or Oasis to take part in some awesome and tasty quizzes.

Pub Quizzing in Hyderabad

Rishabh — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:52:09 +0000

Hyderabad’s foray into pub quizzing (or maybe was this the second attempt) was quite spectacular. Quizerati took care of the content while 10 Downing Street played the role of the pub.

The entry fee for the quiz was 250 per team, which entitled each member to a pint of beer (or mocktail to the teetotalers).The quiz was a completely written affair with 40 questions, 10 divided into 4 themes. Of these 3 were dry themes and the fourth one was a picture round. A team had to “trump” one of the three themes, meaning they would get their points doubled for that one.

As is the case with pub quizzing, its slightly different from the traditional form of quizzing we see at KC or any other established quiz club. There are fewer number of so called “fundas” to be cracked. It was more trivial based quiz, but enjoyable and well compiled. One reason for that is that the questions are read out, which means that the ideal question shouldn’t be more than a sentence long. But despite that, one does find some gems in there such as “Which word was omitted by Mario Puzo in his Godfather novel, something that was also the working title of the book?” Do take a shot at this, its quite workoutable.

The sound quality was decent and the crowd loved the show. There were 13 teams in total (ours came 4th). Going in accordance to the IPL format, each team was allowed to have at max 1 KCircler (the quiz club of Hyderabad) to keep the playing field level.

Hoping to see more such events in city.

Brain of BITS 2009

Rishabh — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:07:00 +0000

In my post about APOGEE I mentioned the Brain of BITS, the lone wolf quiz. It’s the ultimate test of mettle for any BITSian who is quizzically inclined. Getting on stage is an honour, winning the prize is beyond words. It’s significance is not really a matter of opinion and any one who questions its superiority is clearly out of his mind.

Many have ghotted (that’s BITSian for mugging) for months and some even cheated (albeit unsuccessfully) to get on stage, but in the end, none of it counts. This years BOB is now uploaded on the Keep Guessing : The BITS Quizlog It’s probably the only BOB quiz with an online presence, but then everything must have a first. Try it and then pass it along.

As for BOB itself, for the next year or so, it rests in the room of King Diamond, a brilliant quizzer who deserved the title and his real name is known to be Siddharth Ravichandran. His online home can be found here.

Diversification of Quizzing

Rishabh — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:24:00 +0000

After returning from the NSIT quiz (about which I have blogged here ), I came across Ankur’s post where he presented his case:

I’ve noticed one thing about ‘general’ quizzes in general: they go into excruciating details of lots of things ranging from literature, movies, music, pop culture, history, mythology and whatnot – but computers and technology is something which gets just a passing mention at best or nothing at all at worst.

He further cites an example saying,

Even at Mahaquizzer there are hardly any questions on tech. (Asking who’s the founder of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg – in a quiz of Mahaquizzer’s level where the other questions are so good is laughable. And not many were aware of this!).

And finally comes around to make his point.

Does computers and technology deserve to be treated as a pariah in quizzes. Most definitely not! Given its ubiquity in the current century it deserves more coverage in quizzes. Given the granularity of trivia asked in other topics, technology deserves at least some mention.

But the point I am trying to address is a much larger one. And Skimpy nails it in this post of his:

Different quizmasters have different interests. However, there are a few things that a large number of quizmasters are interested in, and these form a dominant portion of most quizzes. There is some sort of a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop at play here.

And if you don’t share these “special interests”, then your average performance automatically gets capped.

Of course, this doesn’t apply in case you force yourself to develop new interests just for the sake of quizzing, but that, I think, defeats the whole purpose

Not getting what I’m hinting at? Try to go back and recollect the number of times Asterix was the answer to a Long Visual Connect.

But I digress, what I mean to say that though most quizzes claim to be a “general” quiz. There is nothing “general” about them. Somehow it’s just assumed that every quizzer just has to be well versed with “certain” topics. After having interacted with a lot of people I realised that some of my friends didn’t fare that well (some even disliked) in a quiz because they found it catered only to an audience with a niche set of interests and that bringing somethng new to the table wasn’t rewarding enough.

At BITS, I know people who have a huge knowledge base in a lot of interesting topics however I also know that they can never qualify for a quiz for their knowledge will never be tested. I suppose that’s the reason while BITS does exceedingly well in Entertainment, we get pwned in Business Quizzing. At the same time quizzing in other topics isn’t really encouraged either.

I always used to think that Business Quizzing was useless and that there were no “fundas” to be cracked there since you either knew the answer of not. But then can’t the same be said about H2G2 or The Watchmen? And as I spend more and more time reading for the Crucible finals, I realise the questions can be quite workoutable in Biz Quizzes also.

Won the Tata Crucible Jaipur Edition

Rishabh — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:45:00 +0000

Remember how I said its been a good run so far as far as the quizzes were concerned? Well, it just got better.

A lot better.

We (that Sailesh Jha and myself) just won the Jaipur leg of the Tata Crucible campus edition Quiz. The quiz was pretty easy. The official report is here.

In the finals we messed up the directs given to us initially but the buzzer rounds were ours to own. Got two back to back right for +15′s which sealed the game for us. But obviously there are areas where we lack. Commercials for example. So this means I gotta start watching TV now

So now we’re going to be representing Rajasthan and obviously BITS Pilani, at the national semi-finals at Mumbai sometime next month.

This was also my first crucible. Having heard so many different views over the past year about crucible, here is what I would like to say about this particular crucible.

For a city like Jaipur (which isn’t really quizzically inclined), for over 100 teams to turn up on a day when you should be out there getting down, is a respectable achievement.

Since it was the first time the quiz was held in Jaipur, they decided to go easy on the questions, this meant no scope to miss sitters. Flattened field. Especially in the prelims.

I have heard a lot of neative reviews about Giri, and this was my first Pickbrain quiz and if my opinion was to be based on this quiz alone, I’d have to confess that he was an excellent QM.

And lastly, Tata don’t give a SHIT about recession. Instead they go ahead and increase the prize money. And throw in some electronic gadets and what not.

Format:

This was the format for our quiz (though Giri hinted that it might be different at different center, dunno if he was kidding or not)

Prelims, 4 teams make it to finals directly, 2 through wild card round (for <100>

Finals has 4 rounds, first one is dry question round, where questions pass, +10, no negative.

second round, identification of the photos, same questions passable, +10 no negatives

Next 2 are on the buzzer,

One round is a who am I round, which has 3 questions of three clues each. If you get the answer on the first clue, +15. +10,+5 on subsequent clues. -10 for all wrong answers.

And then the connect round. +10, -5 marking.

I’ve tried to recollect as many questions as I could from the quiz:

Photo of Lalit Modi, identify

Photo of Deepak Parekh

Ad of Nokia (old man with duck)

Ad of sunfeast (Dhoni one)

Gave us the full form of IKEA and asked how we better knew this home furnishing giant

Bougette in French means “little bag”, what word has this contributed to the world of finance?

Budget

“One World One Dream” was the tagline of which major mega event in 2008?

Beijing Olympics

Which company makes its product using the 7X formula

Coke

Gave us a pic of an ad-Revlon

Major Indian pharma giant formed by Khwaja Ahmed in 1935 (don’t remember the framing of the question)

Cipla

Expand HDFC

Housing & Development Finance Corp

Expand SIM

Subscriber Identity Module

What resulted when Ruth Handler saw her daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls?

Barbie

Logo of Bank of Baroda, Identify

Old B&W pic of Taj Mahal Hotel

On the Road Again

Rishabh — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:02:00 +0000

It’s been a nice month on the quizzing front for me. Some good money and some good mental floss. First off was the quiz at UIET, Chandigarh. We had earlier planned to go to Gnosiomania but seeing that UIET offered 10k as their prize money we decided to change our destination at the last moment and dashed our way to Chandigarh. Here’s a post by the Thapar Guys on their Quiz Blog about the event.

Kutub Quizzers hosted that quiz, t’was good wonly. A lot of stuff was quite workoutable and we won rather comfortably though Saurya’s team came second by a narrow margin, who were given stiff competition by a team from Thapar.

So with a lot of cash in our kitty and some excellent food at my relatives place, we came back to Pilani with smiles.

Last week, there was the NSIT quiz fest(check out their quiz blog here). The online quiz had been giving us quite a scare (personally the only question I could answer effortlessly was Chamillionaire, I know my Hip Hop well).

The prelims to the college MELA quiz were pretty decent with a few “weird” ones, but it was us who managed to mess it u. Turned out we just made it, thanks to the starred questions. Vivek and me had teamed up, and Saurya was with some other bloke. Both our teams made it, Saurya’s team cracked the elims.

In the finals, we had a dog chase battle with the team sitting next to us (I don’t quite know from which college they were) but ultimately we succeeded to narrowly cling on to our lead. Great success.

We got hammered in the finals coz we missed some sitters. The highlight was the Absolut Connect which no one got. Except me. But even that wasn’t good enough to land us the 2nd place which we missed by a couple of questions. It was quite disappointing. But oh well, shit happens. This semester is going to be about conquering Delhi and Jaipur and Chandigarh and what not. Here’s a post about the NSIT Quiz in which Ankur raises a valid point, shall address that in the coming posts for sure. And yes, Avinash Mudaliar does look like Baba Ramdev

Hopefully my fellow BITSian comrades will follow my lead. It’s a pity that we’re so bloody far from any city.

P.S: I fell while snoozing in the bus and now have a dirrrty black mark on my leg. Yes, you did not have to know that.

But now you do.