The Swarovski Earrings

On Friday evening I tweeted:

Louis philippe best white shirt – rs X1
Swarovski crystal earrings – rs X2
Dinner at taj west end – rs X3
Proposal accepted – priceless

Now I must confess that there was a lie. Which I tried to mask by using variables for the various values. Of course, at the time of tweeting this, I didn’t know the value of X3; though I figured it out an hour later. The value of X1 is well known. The lie was in the X2 bit. The thing is I don’t know. Because the Swarovski crystal earrings weren’t bought; they were won.

Back in 2000 when I entered IIT Madras, I started doing extremely bad in quizzes there. It took me a long while to get adjusted to the format there (long questions, all-night quizzes… ) and a lot of stuff that got asked there was about stuff that I didn’t care much about so I didn’t really bother doing well. There’s this old joke that every IITM quiz should start and end with a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) question with two more LOTR questions in the middle, and all this is only in one half of the quiz.

In my first year there, there was also the additional problem of finding good people to quiz with. You invariably ended up going with someone either from your hostel or your class who might have attended their school trials for the Bournvita Quiz Contest, or sometimes quizzers you know from Bangalore. Still, the lack of a settled team meant that there was a cap on how well one could do. All through first year, I didn’t qualify in a single quiz, neither in Madras nor when I came home to Bangalore.

Second year was marginally different. There was still no settled team but the format wasn’t strange any more. And quizzes had started to get a little more general and less esoteric. I had started to qualify, or just miss qualification, in some quizzes. And around this time, while struggling with VLSI circuits and being accused by the Prof of being potential WTC Bombers (this was a few days after 9/11) I heard God and Ranga talk about some Dakshinachitra where they had qualified for the finals.

So Dakshinachitra is this heritage center on East Coast Road and they had been conducting an India Quiz. It was a strange format – three rounds of prelims with two teams (of two people) qualifying from each round. God and Ranga had gone for the first round of prelims and had sailed through. They had told me the competition hadn’t been too tough and so the following week Droopy and I headed out, taking some random local bus to the place.

We too made it peacefully to the finals and then found that it had turned out to be an all-IIT finals. However, they refused to shift the venue of the finals to the IIT campus and so all of us had to brave the Saturday afternoonMadras sun and head out again to the place. Thankfully this time they’d organized a bus from somewhere close to IIT.

I don’t remember too much of the finals apart from the fact that there was a buzzer round with extremely high stakes, in which Droopy and I did rather well. I remember one question in the buzzer round being cancelled because an audience member shouted out the answer. I remember there was this fraud-max specialist round where we were quizzed on a topic we’d picked beforehand. Thankfully the stakes there weren’t too high. It wasn’t a great quiz by general quizzing standards but what mattered was we won, marginally ahead of God and Ranga in a close finish.

The next morning Droopy and I appeard in the supplement pages of the New Indian Express, holding this huge winner’s certificate with Air India’s name on it (they took back that certificate as soon as the photo was taken). We were promised one return ticket each by Air India to any destination in some really limited list, but somehow they frauded on it and we could never fly. God and Ranga got a holiday each in some resort, and I don’t think they took that, too.

There were a lot of random things as prizes. There were some random old music CDs. Maybe some movie CDs too. I remember God and Ranga getting saris (god (not God, maybe God also) knows what they did with it). Droopy and I got coupons from VLCC. I put NED to encash them. Droopy went and was given a free haircut. And then there were these earrings.

Not knowing what to do with them, I just gave them to my mother. She, however, refused to wear them saying that since I’d won them, it was only appropriate that they go to my wife. So she put them away in the locker in my Jayanagar house and told me to take them out only when I had decided who I wanted to marry. And I, then a geeky 18-year old IITian, had decided to use these earrings while proposing marriage.

So early in the evening on Friday I went to the Jayanagar house and took the earrings out of the locker. What followed can be seen in the tweet. Oh, and now you might want to start following this blog.

PS: apologies for the extra-long post, but given the nature of the subject I suppose you can’t blame me for getting carried away