The duo of G. Sreekanth and R. Jayakanthan of TCS, Chennai, emerged top in the 2013 edition of ‘Cerebration’, the annual Business Line corporate quiz.
Mr. Sreekanth and Mr. Jayakanthan walked home with the winners’ trophy and gift cheques of Rs.1 lakh, in addition to handsome luxury watches from Raymond Weil.
The runners-up Anupam Jain and Rohan Khanna of Genpact, Delhi, received a gift cheque of Rs.70,000. The second-runners-up were A. G. K. Murthy and J. Rahul of Vizag Steel, Hyderabad, who received a cheque of Rs.50,000.
“The primary purpose of a quiz is and should be knowledge-gain. Given this, it is also the right sort of content in a quiz show that determines its value as thousands of brands are being launched daily. So a good contest is one that does not simply deteriorate into a mugging-game,” feels Mr. Sreekanth, who was also a semi-finalist on Mastermind India. Having said this, he feels the biggest game-changers in crunch quizzing situations are memory recall and, of course, luck.
The winners attribute their success to a quizzing culture at TCS, a view that finds resonance with runner-up Anupam Jain of Genpact, Delhi.
“One requires corporate commitment to encourage quizzing within the organisation,” says Mr. Jain, an avid reader of Second World War non-fiction and a firm believer in the credo: everything has a story.
Second runners-up opine that a finale is like a mental gunfight in a grand showdown, not unlike those in Western films. They credit their organisation for backing their passion wholeheartedly by sending them to as many prestigious quizzes throughout the year.
Inimitable quizmaster Giri Balasubramaniam, the event-anchor affectionately nicknamed ‘Pickbrains’, describes the rise of corporate quizzing to a concerted effort to boost knowledge levels of a company’s workforce.
According to Mr. Balasubramaniam, large-scale quizzing events, whether at the school, college or corporate level, reflected the country’s rise as a knowledge economy besides being a catalyst to initiate the uninitiated.
Altogether, 800 teams from some of the biggest corporate institutions, management institutes and engineering colleges participated in the event that kick-started on January 6 in Chennai. The title sponsor for the event was Corporation Bank and associate sponsors were NCDEX and SAIL. The gift sponsors were Raymond Weil, App Tabs and Lawrence & Mayo.
