On a winning spree

FIRST it was Siddharth Basu. Then came others and suddenly the quizzing scene never was the same in India. Quiz had become an `event'.

Today there is a breed of young quizmasters performing on stage, enthralling the audience, making every quiz seem a SHOW!

Last week at the Kamaraj Memorial Hall in Teynampet, the TCS QuizIT.com for school kids was a quiz master's show, all over again, without taking away any of the credit from the participants. It must have taken Giri Subramaniam all his energy and experience to keep a crowd of 1200 odd children glued to their seats for a full five and a half hours! Chennai has only recently met the quizmaster from Bangalore based dot com, quizbrain.com, but then, going by crowd response, he did not take long to reach the top of the popularity rating charts.

Actually, to say `glued to the seats' would be to discredit the enthusiasm of the children gathered there. They pranced merrily about, but perfectly on time, not interrupting the proceedings until it was time for the audience questions. Of course, they found the KBC influence much too hard to resist-taking to prompt a la Bachchan: `try your lifelines', `what about the audience rating' . Apart from that, a rather well behaved crowd, happy with the questions which were aplenty, as were the prizes, but then, that is another story.

The evening, which began quite on time, and more importantly, ended on time, was quite an experience - not only for the kids who won, but also those who did not - they were also happy, those who stand and wait. Part of the glamour of the event was in the prizes that school kids carried home. T-shirts, watches, cassettes, lunch coupons for the audience questions. As for the Chennai round winners, prudent were they who decided to hire a truck to take the booty home!

Especially, Nandan Saha and G.Vinod of St. Michael's. Apart from the cash prize of Rs. 14,000 and the rolling trophy, there were attractive prizes from TCS, Jet Airways, TI Cycles, Titan, Whizkids, BPL net, Indiainfo.com, MGM Dizeeworld, Higginbothams, Pizza Corner, Chennai Online and Hotels Taj Coromandel, Park sheraton, Chola Sheraton, Taj Connemara, Radisson, GRT Grand Days, Hotel Breeze. They got the lot - from plane tickets, cycles, watches, coupons for lunch and yes, even towels!

Then, as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The young men from St. Michael's sweated it out for the honours and how! In a tight cornered contest with the equally sharp team from Bhavan's Rajaji Vidyashram, comprising Vikram and Siddharth, St. Michael's just about made it. Like quizmaster Giri said, ``the Bhavan's team took their defeat (if you could call it that) gracefully, cheering the winning team as loud as they could''. The bounty they carried home may not have been as bountiful as the winners, but enough to fill a mini truck. The second runner up was the team from SBOA, comprising Arun and Akshay.

Well attended, well answered and well conducted (by the TCS team) was the diagnosis. And every body went home with a good report card and the feeling that Chennai, but for its weather, could well be a Silicon Valley.

By Ramya Kannan

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