life and other disasters: The stupidest quiz master!

Last month our department conducted an inter-departmental quiz competition. The selection of the questions, creation of the presentation and the different rounds and it’s rules were to be decided and prepared by me. I had help from classmates and teachers, they gave me ideas for new questions. Not that I mind the hard work, but every single work was entrusted to me. Even I wouldn’t entrust me with more than one activity at a time. I worked possibly harder than I have done in my whole life. I stayed in the department staff room all day, missing classes (not that I mind that!) typing in hundreds of questions. There were days when I would come after the first hour and walk straight into the department staff room, and only come out for lunch. The questions were ready on the day before the quiz-festa scientia; the name means festival of knowledge in Latin. (cheeky huh? My idea, I know it’s silly) the promotion for the program was tremendous, we had 50 teams register for the quiz and it wasn’t for another day.

My classmate binu handled the stage arrangements, he’s Michelangelo with a blade and thermocol. He made a cut out of popeye holding a board which read fest a scientia. I think it became more famous in our college than the new canteen. More people thronged to watch it than the new canteen. Back to the topic, the quiz was created by me so out of common courtesy; I was given the quiz master position along with another girl from the first year. On the D-day the prize money was announced the five finalist teams will get assured prize money.

I - rs. 1001

II - rs.501

III-rs.250

IV-rs.150

V - rs 150

Quite frankly this was jackpot for our college students, as no one has seen such a prize money in an inter-department contest since…..forever! and the prelims saw almost 40 teams show up, not bad considering we had a private bus strike on that day. (most of the students come by private bus) The prelim questions were so tough that we had to correct by, asking all the people who corrected how many every team got wrong. The top score out of 11 questions (typo, I thought there were only 10, but typed the number 4 twice, so had 11 questions. No one figured it out though) was 5. so 5 teams were selected and announced.

And after handing over the computer and projector to a nitwit and a troll of a first year guy Antony, who first broke the switch board and later screwed up a simple task. I started the questions pretty well (after a minor hiccup ..got confused about the first round’s rule) but at one point the nitwit scrolled through a few slides quickly, the questions and answers were clearly exposed. So had to adapt, but not before I passed a multiple choice question to another team.(which is an organizational nightmare on my part) The rest of the competition went okay..ish. You see I didn’t remember all the answers, so when a team gave the correct answer to a question I told them it’s wrong and when the answer came out, there was a lot of yelling and complaining(I explained to them that I was not as bright as the contestants we had that day, picture your average quiz master saying that out loud. I know I really am not that bright!). And there was an answer where a Malayalam sentence was written in English. I pronounced it awfully bad. (I can be excused, because half the college already makes fun of my Malayalam. The rest have not heard me speak Malayalam) But finally the rapid fire round came and I took over the computer from the nitwit and the first year girl took over the stage. And at the end there was a clear winner. And a tiebreaker decided the second place.