Quiz on the Net

The first time I heard this phrase was when I was in the first trimester at TAPMI. There was a quiz conducted by IIM Bangalore, which was one of its kinds. The quiz would start at 9pm everyday for a week. There would be 15 questions to be answered in 15 minutes. You can use any help from any known source and send in the answers for the 15 questions. I did not play the quiz at that time, but did help a few seniors in getting the answers from Google.

In the first year at TAPMI, I was part of the Systems Forum. Towards the end of the first year, it was customary that the junior members show their caliber by conducting an event without any help from the seniors (Ofcourse, they did help a lot in administration during the game). The term was coming to an end, with just 2 weeks remaining and the seniors were literally after us to conduct something.

There were 4 of us in Systems Forum, Narasimha Raju, Nitin Gupta, Yashasvi Arun and myself. During one such casual chat with Raju and Yash, I suggested that we conduct “Quiz on the Net” at TAPMI, with the same rules. Raju said he could take care of the coding in ASP (Access as backend), while Yash said that he could provide the front end of the game in HTML. We got to work and in 2 days time the game was ready. It was launched with much advertisement and to our amazement 54 teams enrolled for the game. That was a record for any game conducted by any forum/committee at TAPMI. I still remember how the labs (CC & Systems lab), Library and Hostels were all crammed with people who wanted to play the game. The game went on without any hiccup and it was a major success. The game did give us a few tensed moments, but it finally went well.

After its success, two other forums wanted to conduct a quiz in the similar fashion, with Systems Forum providing the technical support. Those games added to the popularity of the Systems Forum and it helped us beat Finance Forum for the best Forum award in the year 2003-04. That was indeed a great moment; it was an award that we thoroughly deserved.

Come second year, the idea developed by IIM Bangalore caught on with other B-Schools, and they came up with better quizzes. One such conducted by NITIE – titled Mastishk – was a brilliant one. During the 10 days, I used to skip everything and dedicate all my time in solving the quizzes. I was rewarded by scoring the highest points in 3 out of the 10 quizzes, and winning one of them.

Now that I have left college, I thought that quizzes and stuff were over for me, but I was to be proved wrong. The day I got a computer to work on, there was a quiz being conducted within the organization under the program titled – Discover India. Our company has branches in various locations and this program is aimed at getting the employees to know more about the locations we are at and also learn the kind of business we are earning from the location. Apart from giving business related information about a location, there is a quiz at the end, which was regarding the history, location or importance of the organization. And guess what, I won last weeks quiz!!

I won a Parker pen and a key chain, both of them having my company name embossed on them.

Regarding my trip to Bangalore, I have booked the tickets. I will be traveling by Volvo, which is a costly affair. I will be spending nearly Rs875/- for the trip, which could have been reduced to Rs.400/- if I were to travel by train. I hope that the next time I plan my trip well in advance and get the tickets booked on train. Another incident to add on to my never ending list of “I-could-have-done-it-better-the-other-way”.