Bala Vidya Mandir represented by Siddarth Shrikanth and R. Vignesh won the regional finals of The Hindu Young World quiz and will represent Chennai in the all India finals to be held in Visakhapatnam on November 13.
The annual Young Wolrd quiz was held on Oct. 15 at the Kamaraj Memorial Hall, Teynampet.
Students from the city schools and from the neighbouring towns started coming in from 10 am onwards. 628 teams, 1256 students, teachers and parents filled the huge hall.
The written preliminary round was high-scoring, declared the quizmaster V. V. Ramanan while inviting the top six teams on stage for the regional finals.
Set in ‘Snakes and ladders’ format, the quiz did not have themed rounds as in the regular quizzes of these days, but followed the system of questions being randomly selected by the computer. So the questions from different fields from history, science and unscrambling the letters and newspaper headlines came one after the other. In three rounds of ten questions each and a buzzer round.
While the team from P. S. Senior Secondary School knew their Nursery rhymes by framing a question for ‘frogs and snails, puppy dogs tails’, the team from Chettinad Vidyashram gave the snappy headline for the news ‘Hail Tensing Gyatso’.
If you do not know, the question P. S. Senior gave was ‘What are little boys made of?’ and the headline Chettinad team gave was ‘Dalai Lama wins Nobel peace prize’.
Bala Vidya Mandir who won the quiz, were on the dot to recognise the jumbled letters in ‘If agony awaited’ to frame the word ‘Gateway of India’ and precisely knew that ham comes from the hind legs of the pig!
The student audience too cracked tough question like whose original name could have been Inquilab Srivastav as Amitabh Bachchan!
The technical snag kept the video questions off the quiz and the quizmaster had to skip those questions whenever the dice thrown by the computer selected the video questions. Also, one of the teams was not sure if the buzzer was working during the buzzer round.
The Bala Vidya Mandir team of R. Vignesh and Siddarth Shrikanth both students of class 9, emerged as winners of the regional round with ten points separating them from the runner up team representing Chettinad Vidyashram with Seshadhri S. and Arvind Nayak.
P.S.B.B. Nungambakkam team with Harish Krishna and S. Varun, P.S. Senior Secondary School team with S. Sriram and B. Dhruva Bhat, SBOA School and Junior College team with Preetham Harinath and Bezzam Varun and Vidya Mandir team with Arjun Swami and R. Bharath were the other finalists on stage.