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TCS IT wiz is a premier IT quiz hosted by pickbrain, Giri Balasubramanium. He is probably the most lively host in the world. No wonder, he’s famous. If you are a internet junkie this is the place to be.

Many of my friends and family told me to give it a shot.I thought I should too. So I teamed up with my trusty techy friend, Pramodh. As I entered the venue, I saw a huge gathering of boys and girls, many snatching print outs from their teachers studying abbreviations, company history, faces of founders etc. I got scared at first…the only thing in my hand was a water bottle. A leaky one at that. I later found out that it was of not much use (not the water bottle but those print-outs). Here’s why:

The questions will not be like:

Who is the street rat banging at Steve Jobs’ door yelling “Take back your useless iPad”!

Ans: Suhas Sharma 😀

but will be more like:

What is the device which was released with the feature of retina display:

Ans: iPhone 4 (Now, who doesn’t know iPhone 4?!)

Apparently, the quiz is not completely factual. It’ll have answers which everyone knows but they’ll get hold of these small details that few people know.

The quiz started with a Bang with PickBrain at the spotlight. He started with prizes, the lenovo laptops, netbooks, MP3 players, Dinner with the CEO of TCS, Mr. N Chandrashekaran. We were all drooling at the prizes, hallucinating with us on the podiums. He snapped us out the dream with the word “Preliminary round”. We all got ready with our writing pad.

Actually, those prelims were damn easy. I actually thought that we had gotten through! But the competition was horribly tough. The minimum score for qualification was 18….and we got….. 16!!! (Damn!) “Better luck next time”, I thought. “Wait a minute, there is no next time”, I thought again! 😛 (Damn! ….Again)

Here are some questions that made me kick myself in the butt (Now, don’t think of all those weird yoga postures :D):

1) Whose tagline – “What’s the use of choices if they dont work for you”

Ans: Monster (Like many others, I thought it was Naukri)

2) Which game was brought from USSR to USA. This game was ported from some platform to Commodore 64 (this was a star question)

Ans: Tetris (We knew that it was a russian, but at that point, our minds had gone fishing)

As you can see the questions have the “oh..what’s this?” factor. After they give you the answers, you’re like “oh…it was so simple I can’t believe I missed it!” 😀

And there they were. Those 6 awesome teams that qualified for the finals. It was tough. The match was so intense that buzzers started cracking up. The quiz was like watching a Twenty20 match, questions firing from all sides, contestants hitting boundaries and sixers on every question. Finally, the quiz ended (We didn’t want it to, though 😉 ) , and SBM Jain College were the grand winners!!!

Like pickbrain rightly pointed out, people who didn’t qualify (those like me) were all like “Oh! I knew that”, “Oh my god, that’s in my pocket”, “That guy is visiting me next week!”. Some even peed in their pants (Just kidding 😀 ).

The quiz ended with Lok Ayukta Chief, Justice Santosh Hegde giving a little speech about “Saying no to corruption”, for which he got a standing ovation. The winners walked out with a shiny Lenovo laptop and dinner with N Chandrashekaran (CEO of TCS).

Here are some questions from that spell-binding round of quizzing:

1) They gave the contestants the pictures of Lady Gaga, Obama and Mark Zuckerberg and asked them connect these things.

Ans: Apparently, Lady Gaga has more fans than Obama on Facebook.

2) They showed the pictures of Camel, Java temple, turtle and asked us to connect them.

Ans:They were all programming languages. Camel – Logo of PERL, Java temple- Java. (No wonder I didn’t win :P)

I know you would want more of those. So you can find more questions here.

And yeah..I almost forgot..if you happen to attend any such competition and happen to win it or even go through to the finals, let me know. 🙂