Saraswati Memorial Inter School Fest 2011 – New Era Public School

Finally, I'm back. It's been two months, but a lot of happenings have kept me busy. LOL JK, I was wasting time most of the time and in my procrastination, finally delayed my return to the blogosphere by some time.

So going straight to the aforementioned topic, the Saraswati Memorial Inter School Fest 2011, was held today at New Era Public School, Mayapuri. The IT Crossword was the only tech event in the entire Four Day Symposium, with the other main event being a General Awareness Quiz.

The event allowed two teams from VIII – X, and thus there were four of us who were going. Half of us had been informed about the event the previous day only, but still managed to turn up for the event.

Nevertheless, all four of us reached the transport office early in the morning. The transport department was ready with their Ambassador to transport all of us, but demanded that we have a teacher companion. After a lot of searching and delivering leave applications to the respective reps and headmistresses, we were finally able to depart for New Era, with four children stuffed in the back seat of a 'Sarkaari Ambassador.' (According to our very own driver bhaiya).

Unexpectedly, we reached Mayapuri in about 20 minutes. We found the school relatively sunsaan, with the usual and expected hustle – bustle not there. When inquired, we found that we were among the first teams to have registered, and were about an hour early. So we had an hour and a half to kill, and decided to take a tour of the huge and well built school campus. Along with hosts Arnav Sharma and Prempal Singh, we ended up in the Computer Lab where the event was to be conducted, playing Counter Strike, although not for long.

Finally, the event did start, with me and Vidur getting 20 out of thirty questions, thus topping the prelims. Some questions were direct lift-offs from crossword archives, and some were extremely well made and required some logic. The qualifiers were announced, and the other team from RKP did not make it, so we told them to wait along with our teacher in charge.

The finals began, and the finals were tougher than the prelims (obviously). After some brainstorming, some wisecracking and some plain time wasting, we got about thirteen from an initial nine out of thirty. Waiting for the event to end, to submit our papers, to win (Yup, we were that confident) and get out of there, we received a proposal from the quiz masters – They had decided to hold an onstage dry quiz, and therefore, would declare the winners after tallying the written crossword prelim, the written crossword final and the onstage quiz scores. After some internal discussion and some democratic debate among the participants, the onstage finals were confirmed.

We reached the school's auditorium and waited as the makeshift audience made their way. The questions had been made in haste, it showed. And the microphones being used by the participants were apparently defective, but these things out of the way, it was well-held and flawlessly conducted. After about four rounds of quizzing, we, who'd been leading all throughout, emerged as the winners of the quiz as well as the overall winners of the event.

We received our prizes (Harry Potter Book. Alright, it's lame) quickly and left so that could we could reach in time to board the buses and reach home. The trophies are still to be received by us, and I'll probably get mine tomorrow or day after.

Now it's Code Wars next.