The India Quiz was held on Friday, the 12th of September 2008 at Raman Auditorium. Though the registrations were to start by 5.30 pm, participants began pouring in by 5.00 pm itself, and soon we had a huge quizzing populace thronging our three desks. The team size had been kept limited to 3, and many 2-membered teams and individual contestants showed up as well, some of which were then paired off with one another for more efficient participation. Ultimately we registered around 70 teams, translating to around 160-180 contestants, and I doubt if any other quiz in IIT-Kgp has seen that kind of an attendance.
And then we began with the Prelims. There were 30 India-based questions, from a mixed bag of Mythology, Technology, Entertainment, Business and General, with a higher-than-average difficulty level. The prelims saw eight teams making the cut. They were subjected to four rounds of hard core quizzing...
The first round was based on Mythology, which, for a change,(with respect to quizzing at IIT-Kgp) did not refer to the Greek/Norse Panthenon, but Indian Mythology instead. 16 Questions later, we had our second round of General questions, based on India of course. This round saw a mixture of excitement and anxiety due to the eliminations due after the round.
The last two rounds were both mixed bags of India based questions. The top four teams gave a brilliant display of quizzing prowess, with intelligent guesses and calculated deductions. Many hi-fives and fist thumpings later, we had our winners. "Mostly Harmless", not very true to their name, comprising of Ankit Sethi, Neeraj Goswami and Aditya Mani Jha, had won Jigyasa. They were followed by Varun Singh, Aditya Sriram and Saurav Das,"The Iconoclasts". The 2nd runners up were "The Quizzards of Oz", Kapil Subramanian and Rahul Nanda.
So that was Jigyasa 2008. We hope to make the next edition of Jigyasa better.
