It all started with a scratch when Schaum Knott and I felt that IITM, despite being host to the country’s greatest college quizzing challenge, didn’t host an open quiz worth its salt. We roped in bofi and A Mani as co-quizmasters and bhaand as coordinator of administrative affairs and held the first edition of the IITM National Open Quiz on 18th April 2004. Despite Murphy being in full form that day, it was a fair beginning and QED emerged winner amongst 150 teams.
The Hallmarks of this quiz were the “modified infinite bounce” format (which has become a standard at IITM and IIMB), “closed book themes” (which has been adopted by, among others, the Karnataka Quiz Association), a 72-visual connect and for perhaps the first time at IITM, questions on a powerpoint slide-show.
The third edition of the quiz was held yesterday (the October 2nd National holiday slot has been “captured” by the IITM open; Landmark is on Independence day and Odyssey on Republic Day). Much better organized than the first edition which we organized (for details of the second edition, refer bhaand’s blog). The ambience was amazing, infra was in perfect order (all thanks to Baju, the “organizing secretary”), there was a new electronic scoreboard and yeah, the much-maligned acoustics was given a face-lift with new Bose speakers.
All of fifteen hundred people turned up, from places as “far flung” as Hyd and Bombay. Questions, as usual, were excellent and well-researched; and an attempt was made to make it a junta-quiz, though at no point of time did it show up as a quiz show.
There were some usual cribs though – too much of Europe, too much Christian Theology, not much sport, unfairness in part points, etc. However, such cribs are an integral part of any huge quiz and can thus be forgiven.
All in all, feeling damn proud to have started something which has now taken off on such a huge scale.