Sometimes, having all the right pieces in hand is not enough to crack the puzzle, making them fit together to arrive at the bigger picture matters. Something that finalists of the ‘Rock Quiz,’ hosted by Quizzociates, would have easily concurred with at the last laps of the contest on Sunday.
As a sluggish, easy to sing-along ‘Buffalo Soldier’ rang through the auditorium, pictures of a dark-skinned woman, a man with a pipe and a frozen movie frame flashed on the screen.
While some quizzers were able to identify one or two of the entities as reggae king Bob Marley’s signature track, field and track sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser, Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and a still from the first Bond movie, Doctor No, the connection between them remained elusive.
In the battle of wits between school and college students, knowing the right answers was not good enough to bag the trophy; threading them seamlessly was.
The underlying connection here was a tough nut to crack – ‘Jamaica’. While the sprinter and the musician hail from the country, Fleming created the character of Bond while on a vacation to Jamaica, where the movie was also incidentally shot.
For anyone with an intellectual curiosity, the mix of images, audio clips, no-fuss questions and nerve-wracking conundrums turned out to be engaging.
C.Sridhar and Visaka Simhan of SASTRA, champions of last year’s edition, repeated their act of ensuring there was no race for the top by besting the rest by almost 100 points.
The quiz, for the first time, included school students from Class XI and XII who competed on an equal footing with college students.
The school teams that took second and third place – M.R.Sai Vignesh and A.Nimalan from SBIOA, Madurai, and J.Murali and Aswin S.Varrier from Kamalaniketan and R.S.K proved that they could give collegians a run for their money. The third place however was a tie-breaker between three teams.
Taking up the mantle as quiz master, G. Kedarnath, Secretary of the club, made sure the wait for the right answers was worthwhile, supplying interesting titbits of information. C.A. Srivatsan, chartered accountant awarded the winners.
