Date:28/09/2005 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2005/09/28/stories/2005092815450200.htm

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

A quiz and a test of character

Sudhish Kamath

Five teams brave power-cut, go through rigorous quizzing

QUESTION TIME INDIA: Quiz master Priamvada Viswanathan awaits a reply at the Indian Airlines Welcome Aboard inter-college quiz on Tuesday. — Photo: K.V. Srinivasan

CHENNAI: Imagine five teams racking their brain on a stuffy afternoon, having beaten 83 other teams from the preliminaries earlier in the day.

After hours of rigorous quizzing in the prelims and the semi-finals, they ended up on stage with a power-cut to further test their character at the Indian Airlines Welcome Abroad Quiz, organised in association with Hi-Tours and the Public Relations Department of MOP Vaishnav College.

The hosts had a bad day as none of 31 teams from MOP Vaishnav College that registered for the prelims made it to the final. Nor did any other girl team. The finalists were all men: Two teams from Anna University's College of Engineering, Guindy, (CEG-1&2) and one team from SRM, Loyola and SVCE each. Before the last two rounds, the winners of the quiz, Vijay Raghavendra and Venkat Ram (from CEG-2) stood fourth in the overall scores.

The penultimate round of Dumb Charades completely altered the positions. SRM and Loyola who were neck-and-neck till that round at 65 and 62 points respectively, failed to get two relatively simple clues. Simple, because everybody else in the audience seemed to be able to guess `Great Wall of China' and `Suicide Point' from the clueing.

So while the teams stayed put there, the CEG-2 guys got 20 points after guessing their answer in less than 10 seconds and ended up with 47 points. The last round was buzzer-based.

The team from SVCE played spoilsport of a tight quiz by going for the buzzer with a wrong answer every other time and ruined the chances of SRM or Loyola ever getting a chance to answer.

This is where CEG-2 got two answers right (and ten points for each answer) and raced to 67 leaving SRM's Shashwath and Arun Ganesh and Loyola's Pravin and Balajee where they were two rounds ago.

So CEG-2 now get to go to Malaysia, courtesy Indian Airlines and Tourism Malaysia, SRM to Singapore, thanks to Indian Airlines and The Traveller DMC while the Loyola guys will go to Bangkok, winning tickets from Indian Airlines and their stay sponsored by Hi-Tours.

The other team from Anna University (CEG-1), Vinay and Archit, won a prize for smart guessing, a two nights and three days stay at Sterling Resorts sponsored by Swamimalai of Indeco Leisure Hotels. SVCE, the team to finish last ended up as clowns of the pack, with the audience jeering their desperate attempts to score.