Phew!

Nine years ago, on August 15th, I attended the Landmark Quiz ‘99 with two class mates Nandan and Abhishek. We had been winning almost all the school quizzes we went to that season and so we landed up at the Music Academy rather high on confidence. As there was a prize for the best team name, we had racked our brains and come up with the extremely creative ‘Qwizards’, little knowing that around 1/3rd of the 1000 odd teams that took part at the country’s biggest open quiz usually went by that name.The shock and awe we felt when we had our first glimpse of the 3000-strong crowd of quizzers milling outside the venue filled me with dread and inside the auditorium, the feeling of excitement tinged with anticipation gave me goosebumps. When the quizmaster Dr. Navin Jayakumar took the stage and introduced the quiz, we wondered who this guy was. The written prelims soon began and we gave it our best shot, managing to score only 12/40. Eight teams would make it on stage for the finals and we later learnt that the cut-off was somewhere close to 32!! Disappointed, we sat through the entire finals, watching with wonder as the finalists answered questions that went miles over our heads. The winner on that particular day was a team named ‘Parijatha’ comprising V.V.Ramanan, Bharat Epur and Yashwant Saran. Just five hours after seeing him for the first time, I left thinking Dr. Navin was the best quizmaster ever!We spent the next year trying to read and watch better stuff in the hope of equipping ourselves to do better at the next edition, but when it finally came, it brought with it a big disappointment. Dr. Navin was temporarily out of the country and his place was taken by Derek O’Brien, who turned the quiz into a show. As a school team, we scored 29/40, with the finals cut-off at 30. That would NEVER ever happen in a proper Landmark quiz. We were extremely disappointed at missing out on the finals, but also knew that we didn’t deserve to be on stage. Derek’s questions are usually gimmicky and childish and make his quizzes a bit of a lottery, with the best team on stage not necessarily winning each time. Dr. Navin, on the other hand, always has a good mix of questions and even his crowd-pleasing questions usually hold great value for serious quizzers as well.In the 10 Landmark quizzes that have been held after that, (7 in Chennai and 3 in Bangalore) my team ‘Intel Inside, Mental Outside’ has managed to make it to the finals on eight occasions but always, a great performance in the prelims would lead to a truly pathetic one in the finals. We did manage a 3rd place once in Bangalore but that was a Derek quiz and doesn’t count as a major quizzing achievement in my books at least. Whenever Dr. Navin did the quiz, we weren’t upto the mark. 5th, 8th, 4th, 7th - we managed to finish in almost every position except the top three and year after year, went home frustrated at another opportunity spurned.Yesterday marked the 15th edition of the Landmark Quiz and it was being conducted by Dr. Navin after a gap of two years. Over the years, my steady team mate has been Krishnamurti a.k.a Goach while the third team mate kept changing. Goach was missing in action this year, after deciding that his academics at IIM-A was more important than flying to Chennai and back for a quiz contest. Bleddy idiot! (Just kidding, Goach!) So, my team mates were quizzing buddies Vikram and DP. We did pretty well in the prelims and made it on stage quite comfortably.The finals went pretty well too and when the last question was asked, the team leading was on 94, we were on 85 and the team lying third was on 78. We had just started dreaming about us answering the last question and winning the quiz dramatically when the team lying third answered it, moved to 88 and pushed us to 3rd! It was shattering, but the joy at finally having placed in a proper Landmark Quiz was the more dominant emotion!! Also, the teams that beat us were made up of very good friends and far superior quizzers ‘QED’ (Samanth Subramanian, Swami and V.V.Ramanan) and ‘Know Brainers’ (Gopal Kidao, Sumo and Rajiv Rai). So, we didn’t feel too bad. Hopefully, things will get better from now on!