Behind The Scenes at ECONORM 08

The ECONORM 08 was finally held on 10th Nov 08. Must say, the first half an hour was the worst period of my time. Sanskriti School was the first to arrive dot at 8:15 and we still were far from ready. By the time we wrapped up registration, two judges had still not arrived and when I reached up, i saw that they had begun the programme and I am like, "OMG, it has started!!"

I actually took the easier way out. I retreated from the AVH (left it to Nivedita) and sneaked into the Blossoms' Basement for the Inquizition and Brainstorming. These two events went off really well, but it was far from perfect. Brainstorming first. I really didn't spend much time here either. My trusted lieutenant, Sneha Chakravarthy, quite ably handled the entire event.

Meanwhile, I was with the quiz guys. After all, I am supposed to be a quizzing guy, ain't I? Anyways, in any eco quiz, 2-3 schools are always ahead of the pack. It was the same case here. New Era Public School topped the prelims with 19 points (out of 40), DPS, Vasant Kunj was second with 18 and St.Columba's third with 18. The problem was with the fourth team. DPS, R K Puram and DPS, NOIDA were tied at 10.5 and had the same scores in the tie-breaker criterion too. Initially, out of the 4 who were checking the papers, 3 were in favour of qualifying our own team. But the one gaddar, Kritika Bajaj, got three more people who favoured DPS, NOIDA and turned us into a minority. Actually, the DPS, NOIDA guys were amateur quizzers and Kritika really didn't want them to go disappointed. Thankfully, our own guys were gracious enough to understand.

But then "the controversy" happened. Modern School, Barakhamba Road came up to Kritika and claimed to have scored 11 and went on the accuse Kritika of taking out her personal grudges against them (these Modern, Bk. Rd. guys beat her in 2-3 quizzes that, in my very unbiased opinion, were a blot on the tradition of quizzing). Kritika, being the naive person that she is, entertained them by telling them where they went wrong. Those guys had written Birla instead of Priyamvada Birla and Recreated instead of Recreation (in Wagon R). We didn't give our own team a point for a mistake of $1, so why should we have given them points for 3 wrong alphabets? However, my co-president, Nivedita Singh, thought that bad blood won't really be good and we decided to hold a 5-question tie-breaker between Modern School, Barakhamba Road and DPS, NOIDA. And surprise, surprise!! Modern, Barakhamba Road scored 0 while DPS, NOIDA scored 2. You see, we don't need to take out our "personal grudges". Because we are very sure of who we are and what we want. We know that in a proper quiz (and not a joke of a quiz), we can beat any other team hands down. However, till the day the standard of eco quizzing rises, we'll be accused of "personal grudges". But we really don't blame the Modern, BK guys. When we had a problem with their quiz at ARTHNAMA and Kritika had gone ballistic, I had made Kritika apoligize because I wanted us to lose gracefully. but this chapter was closed, and closed definitely.

So, the final four teams took to the stage and we threw a lot of questions at them (you can contact me if you want the quiz questions, since many people actually want them). There was a problem in between, when New Era Public School claimed to have 5 more points than the scoreboard showed them to have. I told them to wait until the end of the quiz to clear all doubts. Well handled, I must say. Anyhow, the New Era Public school topped the finals too with I think 105-110 points. St.Columba's was second with 90 and DPS, Vasant Kunj was third with 70, I guess. The DPS, Vasant Kunj guy was supposed to be a big-shot quizzer and he was being too active on stage (interfering, I may add). He was laughed at by the audience a few times, but I felt sorry for having abetted that. I must apologise. I should not have been that rude.

The quiz was really the most acclaimed part of the ECONORM 08. The New Era and St.Columba's guy really praised it and so did Mr.Head Boy, Shubham Prakhar.

Now, once upon a time, another head boy, lets call him Mr.AJ, had told a lot of people that I would be a bad ECONOX President. Mr.AJ, as I told Nivedita Singh, it is not always about the brain and how well you plan and execute. Somewhere down the line, passion comes in. This is what I had and I had lots of it. And the success of the ECONORM proves it.