MASTERMIND - IITD 2002

Date: 28/10/02

Time: 6:30 pm

Venue: Seminar Hall, IIT Delhi

Occasion : The Finals of the 2nd Open IIT Mastermind Quiz Contest

Winner: YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT! (Read on)

The evening that the whole (well almost) of IIT-D had been waiting for was finally here. The evening that would see the passing on of the title of Mastermind-IITD from Sujith Vijay, the winner in 2001, the inaugural edition, to the new champion. Of course, before the crowning we had to deal with a few trivial things first - the gruelling rounds of rapid-fire questions specially prepared for the thespians of the Quizzing Club by the committee members.

          In true Mastermind fashion, the event began with the haunting theme,   "The Menace Approaches" resounding in the dark auditorium. The curtains parted to reveal the solitary chair under the spotlight on stage. The event began with the quizmasters - Anant Sudarshan and Arnav Sinha - calling onto the stage the first contender, Swapnil Chugh, for the first volley of questions, asked from the topic chosen by Chugh himself - The Test Career of Sir Donald Bradman. This set the ball rolling and following Chugh we had seven more contenders coming on one by one to be grilled by questions on their selected fields. This was followed by another round of miscellaneous questions.

Earlier in the evening, Raghav Subbarao, a senior member of the club who was placed second in the category - Literature and Language, in a gallant move, volunteered  to fill in for Sumit Nain, who couldn't turn up because of some "unavoidable" reasons. This was specially commendable as Raghav decided to go ahead with Nain's topic, The Art of George Remi, without any prior preparation.

And finally, after an event that IIT will remember for at least one year, before it is surpassed by another QC masterpiece, we had our new champion - Ankur Kothari, a 1st year student of Textile Engineering from Karakoram Hostel. He almost got to Sujith Vijay's score of 100% in his own selected topic - The Life and Career of Jack Welch, but tthe time ran out and he missed out on the last question. He scored a maximum of 22 out of a possible 30.