C K Prahlad Memorial All India Quiz

Soon after my summer placements (going to work for GSKCH) Kalai and I decided to go to Hyderabad to attend this particular quiz. Kalai had received the poster and was very enthusiastic about it. We booked the ticket at the last moment.

This was my first trip to Hyd. The journey was fine as we took an overnight sleeper and did not realize when we were in Hyderbad. The venue was Vignan Jyothi Institute of Management. They were nice hosts. We met a couple of other quiz enthusiasts including this year's international winner of Tata Crucible Campus Quiz, Naveen Kumar. Thankfully he was not participating. But there were teams from Symbiosis Pune. The prelims were slightly tough, though there were sitters like current railway minister. We could not answer it since I had completely missed the recent cabinet reshuffle. Apart from that there were questions about logos. Most of the questions had some link to the current news. After the prelims we just hanged around. The lunch was good and we made it to the finals. 

This was a very fast paced quiz. Direct questions were asked and once again all of them had some link to the current affairs (like the one about Banana Republic, asked in the context of Robert Vadra's facebook status). We did well from the start and scored consistently. Kalai was excellent as usual. I made some wild guesses which turned out to be correct. We won with a comfortable margin of about 30 points. The second team had 80 points. This was Pune Symbiosis team, one of the members was a Tata Crucible winner. 

Naveen offered us lift after the quiz and drove us to this place called Bawarchi. The tag line of the restaurant was quite unique. A different kind of branding altogether. The dinner was an all Crucible table. We were joined by regional winner from Trichy. So we had winners from Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Trichy. 

Since this was a Diwali weekend we had problems at the bus station while returning. Kalai had cancelled his ticket since he had to leave for Chennai. After much difficulty he found a seat in a Chennai bound bus. My ticket number had changed as a result of the cancellation and hence APSRTC would not let met board the bus. I had to purchase a new ticket for the same seat (the one I had booked earlier).

It was fun carrying around the big trophy at the bus stand with all the curious eyes looking at it with wonder.

Some pictures from the trip. 

 Naveen is third from left.

 The all-Crucible table.

 At the MGBS in Hyderabad with the trophy.

 The restaurant with the uniquest tagline.