AsKQAnce 2014 Report

AsKQAnce

AsKQAnce is the annual quiz fest of the Karnataka Quiz Association. It is generally done on two weekends, the first being a series of Open Quizzes, and the second being a series of quizzes for students from middle school, all the way till college.

Open Quiz Report

The AsKQAnce 2014 Open Quizzes were held between June 27 - 29, 2014. While June 27 & 29 were unsuccessful days, June 28, 2014 (ironically a century after June 28, 1914, the date that changed history), was the day where I enjoyed a 100% qualification at AsKQAnce. In the Sports Quiz, I qualified along with Sachin Deshpande and a couple of other people who were looking for teammates (while I was looking for a team and Sachin came in later), and in the Movie Quiz, I qualified along with Atul Mathew, Rajagpoal P.S. and the anchor of our team in the finals, Arun Ramanathan. However, while the highs were there, they failed to predict the lows that were to soon follow.

School and College Quiz Report

While I could obviously not participate in the school quiz, I decided to watch them in preparation for the college quiz to follow. Before going into details I would like to say that my old high school, St. Joseph's Boys' High School came in for AsKQAnce missing one of their best quizzers (namely Hayden D'Souza of Class VIII). In the High School prelims, I equalled a pair of students from Class VIII (Ritwik Saldanha and Kaustubh Roy), and beat the other team from SJBHS (Hari Kartik and Amrit Sodhi) by just 1 point. While that should have sounded warning bells, it did not prepare me for what followed after.

Hari Kartik, teamed up with Ritwik and Kaustubh and qualified for the finals of the Junior College Quiz (for students of Class XI and XII), despite the fact that their team had one student from Class X and two students of Class VIII (neither of whom was Hayden D'Souza). They outscored me by more than 3 points, and finished tied first due to the silly concept of civilized limited pounce employed by the quiz master and also lack of experience to close out the quiz at a couple of critical junctures. They ended the quiz second, while I failed to qualify (even for the college quiz).

So, while I may be upset that it was the first time I lost to juniors from my school in a quiz while they were still in school, I am also proud that, at least for now, the SJBHS quizzers that I scouted and trained between June 2010 and December 2011 will be competitors, not clowns.

Cultural * of the Year

The first year of my PhD has come and gone, and with it, a lot of mixed feelings. While I have (more or less) gotten the green light to begin research work, to quote Inspector Clouseau: "Well, you know... it wasn't easy." And of course, it wasn't easy.

I got an 8.0 CPI - maybe I could have increased it had I credited Topics in Natural Language Processing instead of auditing it. I could have prepared better for my Seminar had I a little more time (especially with End-sem corrections later), but all in all, I just came out on top. Now, I am home in Bangalore and recapping a hard, but enjoyable, year.

The purpose of this post is to recap a year of cultural excellence (excellence? I participated in only one of IIT Bombay's many cultural domains, and within that, I excelled in only one event!). As mentioned in my earlier post, I am an avid quizzer, and this year, along with academics, I had a lot of fun quizzing (although realistically, not too much success).

The year did not start out too brightly, as I finished a close 4th in the Open General Quiz in IIT. (NOTE: Open here means that it is open to anyone in the Institute, not anyone in the world). Since I did not know anyone there, I decided to make use of a Freshman quota for qualification, by teaming up with a couple of freshmen, thus making it for the finals via quota (Yay for Experience-based Reservation!). As the year went on, I slowly began hitting my stride, teaming up with some of the strong quizzers in IIT.

December was a hectic month. It started first with Mood Indigo 2013 at IIT Bombay, and was followed by Chaos 2013 at IIM Ahmedabad and Nihilanth 2013-'14, also at IIM Ahmedabad. Although I failed to win anything in Mood Indigo and could only just manage a 3rd place in Nihilanth, January was the month I grew leaps and bounds as a quizzer. It was also the month in which I caught a train to Churchgate from Borivali, before going to Dadar, Thane, and then Pune for Landmark Pune, 2014. All because of an almost midnight arrangement with Shamika to go with her to Pune. We qualified for the Finals and won - the wooden spoon, of course. However the momentum continued, culminating in me winning the Wolf Pack General Championship.

In February, I had to complete the two great quizzes of the year that I had set - That's All Toons! (the Cartoon Quiz) and Solus Rex (a massive 400+ question Solo Quiz). In March, were the Hostel, PG, and Institute Awards. Submitting these achievements as a portfolio, I was confident of winning some awards. I had already won a couple of awards in quizzes in PG Cult - helping the Computer Science Department finish 2nd, after IDC - before winning the following awards:

• Hostel 1 Person of the Year (Cultural)
• Institute Freshman of the Year (Cultural)

About the owner

About Me

I am currently a freshman student at IIT Bombay, pursuing my PhD. in Computer Science. I did my B.Tech. in Information Technology from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, Surathkal, and my M.Tech. in Information Technology, specializing in Computer Science, from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT Bangalore). After completing my Masters, I worked for about a year in Nokia. My area of interest in research is in Natural Language Processing. Although I haven't officially committed to a research topic, my topic for a research seminar is on Automated Essay Grading, and I hope to continue that for my PhD. thesis as well.

Hobbies and Pastimes

My major hobby is quizzing. In addition to that, I also watch TV series and movies, and prefer above all, cartoons and anime. I also like reading different things, like fiction, history, sports, news, etc. I listen to music as well, but mostly, it is movie / theme music, Western classical music (when I get significant time, like a couple of hours and don't want to watch a movie during that time), and also a few songs, by people like Tom Lehrer, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, etc.