IIFT Inquizition 2010

We attended the IIFT Inquizition finals on the 28th of August, 2010 at my school auditorium Vidya Mandir along with most of the noted quizzers from the Kolkata Open Quizing circuit. We had taken part in the online prelims of the event from which two teams would qualify directly into the final, after my sister studying at IIFT Delhi had informed me about it.

With a lot of mutual ideas being exchanged, my sister's team "The Toddlers" from IIFT Delhi qualified for the finals at Kolkata along with a team from "The Great Lakes Institute of management", Chennai. We were a little way off in 6th position. But a few hours before the quiz the quiz organisers from IIFT informed us that the Chennai team had backed out and we would be taking their place in the finals. This was an unexpected piece of good luck.

Mr. Dhananjay Shettigar of Quizmonks started the prelims for all the other teams with a question about the Shifting of India's Capital from Calcutta to Delhi. The prelims questions were intelligent & of a very high standard requiring both in depth knowledge as well as working out skills. Me & Sarba having already qualified sat around during the prelims and answered the questions just for fun.

Then the answers were announced & the cutoff scores announced. We saw that we would have missed the cutoff by a mark so making it through the online prelims was even more valuable.
On stage joining us were most of the Kolkata quizzing stalwarts. Debanjan's team had also made it to the finals. We sat next to my sister's team from IIFT warning them it would be a fight for the last place between us.

Then Mr Shettigar started the show. The questions were especially framed keeping in mind the high level of Kolkata Quizzing and most of the first few questions went unanswered. But the questions were really good. Then teams started scoring and thankfully we also got off the mark with what else but a Sports question !!

At the end of the first half of the quiz CP Singh's team were leading and jokingly suggested terminating the event then & there. We had answered a few and were thankfully not bottom.

Then Mr. Shettigar started the theme round. We had been expecting a Kolkata theme and were delighted when after the third question we realised our assumption had been right as the theme was Satyajit Ray. With Sarba in a team there would have been very few questions on Ray that would have been missed and we top scored in the round and very very unexpectedly saw ourselves leading the likes of Jayshridi & Sounakda as well as the top seeds for the quiz Souvikda & Soubhadrada.

But our lead was unexpected for a reason and that reason became clear as the big teams suddenly started scoring big and we got into a rut not answering anything for what seemed like ages. Souvikda & Soubhadroda who had been languishing near the bottom in the first half of the quiz raced into the lead with a flurry of incredible answers & even Jayshridi & Sounakda left us lagging behind with some great answers.

As the quiz ended Sudipda's team also overtook us so we finished a respectable 4th instead of 8th as we had expected.

Mr. Shettigar did a fantastic job and taking part in this quiz was a privilige. The Questions once again were splendidly framed and required both deduction & awareness.

Looking forward to more quizzes from him.


Some questions :

Q. Whom did Peter Drucker credit with introducing the first Hard Hat for worker protection while employed by the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia ?
Ans: Franz Kafka

Q. Which place has 4 metals named after it ?
Ans: Ytterby in Sweden

Q. Who was India's captain when they won their first Olympic hockey Gold & politically what was he the first to demand ?
Ans: Jaipal Singh who demanded the Jhadkhand state

Q.The dance of seven veils or Ishtar was the precursor to what ?
Ans: Striptease