quiz cartoon
One such event was the Quiz competition.
This type of event was constant in every College festival, meant mostly for the FRUIT GANG kind of people. Certain colleges were famous for conducting it. A group of 30-40 teams of two members each used to participate in prelims followed by actual finals between five to six teams. Hope my details are correct because, one it was long time ago, two like most of us, I went in those competitions mainly for fashion shows, and three I am pretty old now with weak memory.
But Accolade was something different. For the final quiz we had roped in Mr. Anand from Times MBA coaching institute. Those of us who had ambitions of IIMs or other top business schools in those days thought of him as some sort of reincarnation of Rajini himself. He was an excellent choice for the event as he had conducted similar events in some other colleges as well and was well known amongst quiz participants.
We were conducting the prelims in our final year class room with seating capacity of 30-35 teams of two members each. We had twice as many sheets of prelims questions. I think this was created by our own Fruit Gang at that time as people had tough time solving them. Ten minutes before the schedule start of event, people started to trickle in. Yours truly and Dicky bird (B Shreeram) were conducting this event.
To our pleasant surprise, the room was filled in no time and there were still some people waiting for their turn. We hurriedly arranged the third year class room as well to accommodate the overflow. The pleasant surprise slowly turned into a nightmare as even the additional room was filled in no time!!! And people were still coming in. Forget about the place for making them sit, we didnot have enough question papers to distribute!!
But in true spirit of Mech Cyclones, when pushed to the wall, ideas flowed. We decided to divide the whole event into two batches. Got some youngsters to conduct the first batch of prelims, while two of us ran towards Xerox shop. While we got more copies done, we both looked at each other to let the thought sink in. We were conducting prelims for about 100 teams of two participants each!!! This was more than twice of what we were used to seeing in other events!!
The brilliant ideas used to advertise the event had paid off big time. Although we could not position life size cut outs of all Mech Cyclones from Karumathampatti till TCE as we had earlier imagined, but what ever we did was top of the line. This was democratization of a hitherto elite event.
Although, the final of the event was a slight anticlimax, when our perceived Rajini turned out to be Prakash Raj. He asked questions like, what were the names of characters in series Friends!! I mean come on, Allen could have done better than that!! And then he said he was only mildly satisfied with the quality of participants!!
But with the participants, the event couldn't have been a grander success. They had fun participating and we had fun conducting it.
