KQA December 2006 Open Quizzes

KQA dished out their monthly serving of quizzing on December 10, 2006. There were two open quizzes at Daly Hall -
1) Hubbubba - Quiz on Bangalore
QM: Arul Mani
2) The regular Open Quiz
QM: Members of the team "Yaake"

(I am writing this after one month; hence this post might be short on details.)

Hubbubba

The Bangalore quiz was a snorter - would have been really tough for a non-Bangalorean (I, wisely, chose to not participate :-)- was tough even for Bangaloreans. The quiz was quite entertaining all the same - with the usual dose of Arul Mani quips and shockingly relevant pieces of trivia about everyday Bangalore.

The range of the questions was quite astounding; there were 50 questions spanning different areas. The quiz was won by (I think) Thejaswi Udupa and partner with a whopping score of...I forget how much... The name Hubbubba was a take (and spoof) on the Bangalore Hubba (very much derided by the QM) that takes place every year.

Trivia tidbits picked up:
There is a Bangalore Square in the city of Minsk
Prabodh Chandra - Manna De used to stay here(?)
Esplanade, boulevard

Open Quiz
The open quiz by Team Yaake was a disappointment. The set of the questions for the prelims was of a very good standard but the the spread of questions for the finals was a big letdown, I would say. The final round was way too long, boring and somewhat repetitive. The questions were too much based around the QMs's special interests - mainly films and songs.

The hightlight of the quiz was the Stage 2 kinda question in the prelims based on the radio stations in Bangalore. The question drew oohs and aahs from the vast majority of those present. It was uncracked I think. It involved the identification of songs (Red Hot Chili Peppers ==> Radio Mirchi, House Of The Rising Sun ==> Soorya or something and so on. Somebody fill me in you can as I've forgotten)

The proportion of weighty trivia, literature, geography, history, politics, etc was too low in order to sustain interest. Even the onstage participants were taking more than the usual number of breaks in between! And yes... there is such a level as being "too trivial"! Some of the questions were set, as it seemed to me, not to be answered but as if to prove a point regarding superiority of knowledge.

Trivia tidbits picked up (finals only, misplaced my notes of the prelims):
polak - game in X-box ad
Dead Lesbian and the Fibrillating something - Scissor Sisters
Mistress Of Spices - Chitro Banerji
Names 911, Steps --> VH1 Return Of The Boyband
MJ Gopalan Trophy - Madras vs Sri Lanka. MJ Gopalan also bowled the first ball in Ranji trophy.
Holla, Mohalla - some funda about the meanings of these words
Comic strips shown - drawn by ??? - from the movie Unbreakable
Stage2 Connection question of a string of visuals - Satyajit Ray
Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy - old Phonetic alphabet - also names of nurses in MASH
Tudor Hall - residence of John Wilkes Booth - family of actors

Personal Experience
My teammates were Vivek and Pavan. We called ourselves "The Corporate Soldiers". We missed out on qualification (oh no, there he goes again!) by a whisker. But it was a very much improved performance - the misses were few, but there were also wild shots that compensated. I missed out on a question on the naming of Trainspotting but that was made up by an effort on an "I Shot Andy Warhol", a movie I hadn't even heard about but still ended up guessing! There were similar hits-and-misses from my teammates too.

But it was just as well that we did not qualify as we wouldn't have been great shakes onstage for the reasons mentioned above and because there was very little correlation between the prelims and the final round questions.