A sense of wonder and awe strikes while watching children in quiz programmes, how they shoot back answers to questions which many adults have no clue about. It becomes tougher when the focus is on information technology.
Dhruv Khurana and Sayan Chaudhry, students of Delhi Public School (DPS), Rohini, Class XII and X respectively, brought laurels to the Capital and their institution when they won the Delhi region round of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) IT Wiz held at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi recently. They entered the finals to be held in Mumbai on December 14 after clearing the written preliminary of 20 questions for all the teams at the venue and beating other five teams selected for the Delhi round final.
The youngsters who have been participating as a team for the last three years, described the Delhi round as a “very close contest and a nail-biting one.”
“TCS was a much higher platform and intense in terms of competition. The format, rounds and scoring was also different,” said Dhruv while Sayan added, “It was the most keenly competed quiz event we have till date participated in.” Well, the margin of five points between the winner and the second placed Bharat Kashyap and Shiven Mian of DPS, R.K. Puram, told it all. Both the winners started participating in IT quiz contests quite early. Dhruv who joined DPS in Class V took interest from then on with the teachers recognising his aptitude and talent. He won his first prize in Class VII.
Sayan took it up in Class VIII when he participated in the inter-school and intra-school competitions organised by his alma mater. To their particular attraction to IT, they simply point out, “In Delhi, there are a lot of IT quiz competitions and not many general quiz contests are held.”
What was impressive was their pragmatic reply on the preparation for an event of this magnitude in which over 1300 students from the National Capital Region participated.
“Preparation is gradual and an everyday process and we manage to take time out of our hectic schedule to read about IT daily,” filled in Sayan adding, “I spend between half-an-hour to a full day depending on my work schedule.”
Dhruv who devoted between 30 minutes and two hours daily as a routine, added, “You cannot prepare in one day. It is an ongoing operation. I enjoy it immensely.”
A sizeable part of their reading was on the web and internet and included news items, articles and journals besides cross-referring on the Wikipedia while supplementing it with magazines and books.
“We did undertake special preparation for the third round, namely @TCS which was about the company itself,” admitted both candidly.
“There is scope for improvement,” said the duo, who felt that they complemented each other’s strength and weakness.
Eagerly looking forward to the finals, which they termed, “would be tough,” they added, “We will notch up our level and will definitely devote more time to our daily preparation.”
Sayan said he “is keen to take up science stream with computers, read books on technology,” while Dhruv aims to pursue computer science and engineering in the U.S. is a self-confessed “avid reader with particular fondness for fiction.”
