On 22nd of September, we were all anxious about this colossal of a quiz, supposed to happen in BITS-Pilani. It was an auto quiz, and my friends had like always again thought quite conveniently of excluding me from their teams, because, well the Vlad was no auto-junkie.
At the last moment, my brah Santa, collaborated with me in a cunning adventure. The day was pretty hectic, to top with a Transport Phenomena-2 Lab. Then I ran the steps upto Room 2220 also familiarly called the ET or Engineering Theatre. We were greeted by some Mahindra men and women, all wearing white with a a small logo asking rhetorically “BIG FAN OF AUTO?“. The back side said “PROVE IT. Mahindra Auto Quotient” (Prove it, I say)
The prizes were pretty captivating, kind of like a dream come true, but I definitely couldn’t avail of the first and second prizes because of the simple reason that ” I don’t have a passport“.
First Prize: Tickets to the Geneva Motor Show
First Runners Up Prize: Dune Bashing in Dubai
Second and Third Runners Up Prize: Mahindra Great Escape 4×4 Rally
We settled down and engaged in casual trivial chit-chat with our compatriots and started creating nuisance. In some time, a tall, fair, young, just-out-of-college guy turned up and introduced him as our quiz-master. This is how I would describe him
“He was a Sardar (Surd), as in someone from the plains of Punjab. He had a Khara on his right arm and had an assortment of various bands sticking close to it. He was about 6 feet 4 inches, was fair, quite inexperienced and had the typical Surd accent. He was a Mount Strombo of Sardar jokes, waiting to splurge out anytime. He just didn’t have any charisma. He wore a red t-shirt coupled with jester-like pointy edged shoes in black leather. A Typical Chom.”
After a delay of around 90 minutes, we got to the prelims. The prelims were confusing, as the questions were all trivia. We thought we would never make it. When it was time to finally reveal the answers, everybody was throwing up all their limbs in anticipation of grand audience prizes. Clearly Mr. QM had no idea what to do. People were blurting out answers everywhere. So he would go from one person to another asking for the correct answer, which took so much time, approximately about 5 minutes for each question. And when he finally encountered the right answer, he would pause, as though he was inducing an unknown dose of lethal suspense into the irritated atmosphere. he was getting on my nerves by repeatedly doing, “Your answerrr……… is absolutely correcttt“. Not even ‘absolutely right‘, but ‘absolutely correct‘.
After a gruelling 40 to 45 minutes of QM- induced-torture, we were astonished to realise that we had actually made the cut-off. Prahytech and Eswar were sulking in the audience. It was stupid, the whole affair actually. The teams were named after many of Mahindra’s brands. We were Team Max Pick Up. Sexually perverted enough.
We ended second and lost the opportunity to make it to the next level, but we didn’t mind. Some important points I would like to stress over here are
1) This quiz was the worst one I ever attended. The QM obviously had no clue what he was asking or what the answers were.
2) No background knowledge provided by their research team.
3) Huge delays, and lot of wasted money.
4) No adequate consolation prizes to even the first runners up.
5) In one question, the QM asks the age-old question “In the 1994 Imola Grand prix , why did Ayrton Senna carry an Austrian flag with him?” The obvious answer would be , “Ronald Ratzenberger died the last day in the qualifying race, so Ayrton wanted to wave the falg in honour of Ronald when he crossed the finish-line.” But one team answers in a way, it invokes laughter in the rest of us sensible fellas “Because he wanted to wave the flag” and he accepts it. We argue but to no avail. He was as dumb as a doorknob.
6) One team identifies a roadster as Chinkara, but doesn’t add Roadster to the name. We add both of them together and say “Chinkara Roadster” and we get points.
7) We all hated him.
I was disappointed with the quiz. Though the concept was good, but only able, intelligent people should be let host a quiz. Quiz-hosting is a hard and tough job, he chooses between right or wrong. Idiots are not welcome.
Congrats to the 2nd-yearite team who made it to the next level. Luck was on their side.
Ambarish Vemuri & Piyush Rathor
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