Trivia, knowledge and quizzing

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras has a long history of conducting exciting and innovative quizzes, and they lived up to their reputation with the IIT-M Open Quiz 2012 on Sunday. The quiz was conducted by the Quiz Club, at the IIT-M campus. The event saw over 400 people participating with the top eight teams selected to the finals.

The quiz had interesting trivia that kept the participants on the stage busy. For example, did you know that Mohiniattam had one change which was inspired by the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma?  While most teams took many wild guesses, inspired by the sarees and blouses women wore, the correct answer was that the dancers started tying their hair in buns, inspired by the paintings.

Another interesting fact was that due to a misplaced decimal point by Professor von Wolff, the iron content of spinach was stated as 10 times higher than it should have been, thus inspiring Popeye, the cartoon character. The IIT-M team is known for inventing the highly popular Long Visual Connect format and this year’s quiz had the LVC round which pleased both avid quizzers and the general audience.

After five rounds of quizzing, ‘QED’ comprising G Swaminathan, Gopal Kidao and R Jayakanthan won the quiz. At second place were ‘Team Nexus’ with Navin Rajaram, Venkatesh Srinivasan and Alagar Samy. ‘Gaja Ka Dost’ which included G Krishnamurti, Ashwin Kumar and Keshavan came third, after winning a close tie-break. NIT Trichy won the best college team, while Bala Vidya Mandir won the best school team award.