Ashwamedh - by Devendra Prabhune

There will be a time in your lives when you'll feel the need to find the tallest mountain around; a time in your lives when you'll feel the need to climb that mountain instead of sleeping away the afternoon and there will be a time in your lives when you'll feel the need to jump off its cliff just to calm your nerves. These are the times when you're alive. These are the times when your mind reaches the other end of the universe trying to find the answer to life. These are the times your soul searches for an outlet to let itself go free. In quizzing terms, this is what happens when the quiz master is Prabhune sir. In today's terms, this is Ashwamedh.

In all our lives we tend to read only the headlines, "Man with the largest family in the world", we look at the picture and just think "Whoa". Not many times do we dig deeper and try to know what was the name of that man. Ashwamedh will test you to such depths that at the end of it, you'd wonder where your mind had been all this while. It's not a typical Quiz where you can try to work around logically and try to reach the answer. Like the mythical horse, this quiz will run over you and you'd either bow down to the question, or you'd make the other quizzers bow to your skill. In that sense, The Ashwamedh is not a competition, it's war. You may remember that picture, you may remember that it's the guy with the largest family in the world, but knowing that doesn't win wars, does it? Knowing that it is a guy from Mizoram named Ziona Chan, that is what win you such quiz wars. 

And so, on this wonderful sunday afternoon, as winter draws to a disappointing end in Nagpur, the finest quizzers in the Orange city had come together on this battleground named "Chaos Theory" to fight with the mighty Ashwamedh. 5 Teams, 28 quizzers all set to test their well trained minds. Like intense movies, probably we could have had a disclaimer,"This is not a quiz for the light hearted". This is no typical snake and ladder game. This is Ashwamedh, and that's where the legends take center stage, lead their team, cool down nerves, and win the damn war. To be frank, this is where Legends are born. Today though, we had 2 teams (each with its own set of veteran quizzers) which went past the rest and were waging a battle of their own to capture the Ashwamedh. In the end, it was just 10 points, which made Team D winners and Team A runners up. 10 points. That's 1 question. One. If that's not close, I don't know what is. The rest of the teams fought bravely, I must say, but the might of such a quiz war does have it's own casualties, doesn't it? They did their best, but it just wasn't enough. 

The scorecard, in case you were wondering who tamed the Ashwamedh in the end:

1st place: Team D : 190 pts : Naivedya Bhati, Nikhil Chug, Aman Mishra, Devavrata Dharkar and Padmanabhan Pillai

2nd place: Team A : 180 pts : Rajat Joshi, Vaibhav C, Aadvik Bhatia, Karman Rai, Devansh Kothari and Anup Manchalwar

3rd place: Team E : 100 pts : Milind Patil, Yogesh Khadke, Riya Lalwani, Sukhada Choudhary, Shiju Samuel and Wing Cmdr Samir Gangakhedkar

4th place: Team C : 85 pts : Kaushik Biswas, Jose Benny, Akhil Badwaik, Anirudha Morarka and Rishi Vij

5th place: Team B : 55 pts : Anurag G, Joy Aggarwal, Mrinmay Meshram, Arpit Aggarwal and Vandana Chitnavis

- by Vishnu "the light hearted" Pillai

The Bagpiper - A General Quiz by Arnav Paul

The Bagpiper:

When you're down and low, lower than the floor,

and you think that you aint got a chance,

Arnav Paul will come, he'll open you a door,

and you'll meet the Bagpiper and dance. 

I have no idea why those four lines came up in my mind when I imagined a General Quiz, The Bagpiper and Arnav Paul in one frame. No, I could'nt imagine the advertisement featuring Ajay Devgun. C'mon it's a quiz, not an after 8 meetup. I also couldn't imagine why I kept on missing these wonderful quizzes. I should probably stop calling myself a quizzer. 

Anyway, after a long time we had Arnav Paul hosting a quiz for NQC. Like everyone who came to know the quiz's name, I too imagined a lot of things (including those ridiculous 4 lines)  thinking why would a quiz be named The Bagpiper? It was after the quiz when I heard a lot of feedback from the quizzers that I come to know that this was a quiz which made you constantly bring out a lot of knowledge from the cold storages of the deepest corners of your brain. I came to know that it was a cool breeze of fresh knowledge in the air which blew from the quizzers to the quiz master that, in a way, made the whole arena resonate. I came to know that once the teams were in unison with the Quiz Master's rythm, the result was an absolute melody. It didn't take me long to realize that this quiz was probably just meant to be called The Bagpiper and Arnav was just the musician. 

Participants from a really wide age group had joined us for this wonderful quiz. With the Highest participation we'd ever had, we had 5 teams full of quizzers competing for that Gold Medal. With questions ranging from Football to Champagne, The Bagpiper was totally a quiz full of the variety you'd expect when you listen to that instrument. While it began like a soothing rythm, our quizzers where not going to miss out a note, they were ready with the beats to get to the answer. And as it got closer to the last few notes, The Bagpiper melody was reaching its peak and we had by then a clear winner. Of the 5 teams, Team E had taken the cake with a comfortable margin. Generally the margin of victory doesn't really make any difference, but when in a quiz like this a team wins with a 55 point margin you know you've got some really awesome badass quizzers. Well, you're at NQC. And at NQC it really doesn't matter because...when you're down and low, lower than the floor, you may think that you aint got a chance, that's when our QM will come, he'll open you a door, and then you'll win and earn yourself your Fans.

The scores!

1st place: Team E : 210 pts : Nrupal Choudhry, Prakhar Rajpalli, Aditya Mittali, Aadvik Bhatia, Anirudha Morarka, LS Bhati and Shiju Samuel.

2nd place : Team A : 155 pts : Naivedya Bhati, Karman Rai, Ripu Oberoi, Anagha Wankhede, Mokshit Kothari, Tanveer Khan and Padmanabhan Pillai.

3rd place : Team C : 135 pts : Tejas S, Mrinmay Meshram, Joy Aggarwal, Snigdha Rewari, Saurav Wanite, Vikrant Sawalkar and Devavrata Dharkar.

4th place : Team B : 105 pts : Vedant Damvi, Yogesh Khadke, Akhilesh Mehadia, Harshal rao, Akhil Badwaik, Ashwin S, Arpit Aggarwal and Anup Manchalwar.

5th place : Team D : 90 pts : Vibhav Pande, Gandharvraj Gwalani, Dhruv Chandak, Aman Jain, Rajat Joshi, Tanmay Chindalia and Vandana Chitnavis.

- by Vishnu "The Pacifier" Pillai