Substantia grisea 2011

I hadn’t been to any quiz for a very long time. And when I got the opportunity to participate at the Grey Matter Quiz 2011, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. But 5-time ‘Quizzer of the Year’ winner, the great Aditya “crystalunicorn” Salapaka did. He wanted to study for his Mathematics paper on the 8th, so I had to team up with Ekta. She hadn’t been to a lot of quizzes, but still has a good knowledge of various topics.

Before the quiz, 5 clues had been put up on gyaan.in. And post the Online Treasure Hunt event at Gateway, I loved to be given another challenge. Easily got the first 2 clues. The first was an audio clip from Portal 2. The second clue was apparently some gibberish lines of text, but were actually lyrics to ‘There Goes My Love’ encoded in Base64.

Got stuck with the 3rd clue. I looked up Treasure Island at Project Gutenberg. But couldn’t make sense of W and L. Word and Letter? Nah. Had no idea about the 4th video. I actually identified the various sources of the video! One of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HosRm46gZJ0&feature=related.

The 5th one was a QR Code which on scanning from my Android turned out to be a telephone number. And just when I was about to hit call, I thought it’d be better if I look it up online. A quick Google search revealed that it was Dominos Bhatinda’s number. The quizmaster must’ve left the last one as a joke, so I thought. The night before the quiz, I sat down to figure out any significance of these questions. Were 3 and 4 important parts of this jigsaw I couldn’t figure out? Frustrated, after fruitlessly trying to figure out a connect went to bed at 2…

And woke up late the next morning. Reached late to school. The car from school had to be refueled, so got late again.  There was this traffic jam at the Mayapuri flyover which didn’t really help.

Pictured: Hugh Jass Traffic on the way to Vasant Kunj

It was already about 8:45 when we reached Vasant Kunj and the following happened:

Ma’am:”Beta, I think we should stop for directions.”
Me: “भैया थोड़ा लेफ्ट ले लो. इधर किसी से पूछ लेते हैं.”  Bad call.

Our driver swiftly changes lanes. Screech. Thud. Splash.

A motorcycle moving to the left of the road crashes right behind our car. The driver moves out, is quickly surrounded. “अबे क्या गाड़ी चला रहा है. “  We quietly left the car, to take an auto nearby and made our way to DPS Vasant Kunj.

We were the 26th school to report. And as it turned out, weren’t that late.

We were soon greeted by the prelim papers, and Vivek and Ankur. 20 questions. +5 bonus questions. The Clue questions! I attempted the bonus questions first, only to be told that they were not criteria for qualification. What!? All the effort I put in, goes to waste? Returning to the main questions, I found I could only get about 10 of them. But believed we would qualify. We submitted the papers and got our refreshments after waiting a while.

The packing was not entirely deceptive, there was a chocolate cupcake. It was delicious and moist.

Reached the audi. The names of the teams which qualified were announced. Sadly, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Quizzers were not among the qualifiers. But I soon realised that this was the first semi-final. And we could still have a shot in the second semi-finals. Which we did.

Got the second place. And soon the quiz commenced. For some reason the difficulty of the second semi-final seemed to be higher than the first. Zero points scored during the first round. The second round was hangman, a buzzer round which have been my undoing at a lot of quizzes. Ekta was quick to buzz at the first question and correctly identified 2-acetoxybenzoic acid (aspirin). Nobody really tried the other questions in the round… but me. I stupidly take another shot at the buzzer and my score drops by 5 points. A blunder that costed me a position in the finals. And this ad will haunt me for the rest of my life. All questions I did know were intercepted by Spring Dales and Mother’s International.

According to the final scores, we were tied at 4th place with DPS Rohini. But we were denied a ‘second chance’ because our score included a negative. Which is a little unfair. A tie-breaker? But even though I couldn’t make it to the finals, I was happy. I had been enjoying the quiz so far.

And then I was informed that I’d be getting a special prize from Mr Ankur Banerjee for having cracked the most number of clues posted online.

YEAH! I ascend the stage once again, like a boss, to accept my reward.

Kaya (coconut jam), One Minute Mandarin, and a few bookmarks...

Whoa! I get a bottle of Kaya, a copy of One Minute Mandarin, and a  few more things. Quite unexpected. At various quizzes, where I’ve failed to get a podium finish, I’ve been lucky to get a souvenir. I still cherish the calculator from Texas Instruments I won at the Jack Kilby quiz. Trophies sit on your mantlepiece, catching on dust, but things like these you never forget.

As I fiddled with my prizes among the audience, the chief guest arrived and the finals started. Mr Banerjee does à la Salman Khan and takes off his T-shirt, showing his ‘Don’t Panic’ shirt below. But the audience get a little more than what they wanted.

The schools onstage put on a good show, with some really intelligent and quick answers. But, “Those who fail to qualify know most of the answers on stage.” is a harsh reality of quizzing. I win a few Bravo and 5-star chocolates, for answering those questions which would have brought me precious points had I qualified. The audience witness a huge upheaval in the score tally in the final round ’6 by 9′. DPS RKP move to the top as Sardar Patel, the previous leaders tumble to the third position. Honestly, if I had chosen the sports question in that round, I could’ve scored 70 points there.

After a speech from the school principal, it felt good to know that my substantia grisea (read: grey matter) wasn’t any less from the finalists. This event was a really wonderful experience. One of the best quizzes I’d seen in a long time. I couldn’t help but notice, a lot of questions were from South-East Asia. I’m not saying that it is a bad thing.

In the end, I might have taken home more goodies home than the winners. Hope to seeing more from Vivek and Ankur at Grey Matter 2012. Oh wait, this is my last year in school. Shit.

P.S.- I know what you’re thinking. “Shikhar’s blog was dead.” “Wait.. he had a blog?” After over 17 months I’m writing at this place on the internet. Surprisingly there has been some activity on my blog, I’ve managed to gather 45,353 views.