Sajan Venniyoor teaches the band to play

A review of the Feb 2011 monthly by Ajachi Chakrabarti

My friends think I'm odd. I ask them why. They can come up with nothing better than the number of noses I have. I begin to think that they're odd. But I digress. One of the reasons my friends think I'm odd is that my idea of unwinding after a particularly stressful Quark is to go to Panjim for a quiz. A SEQC Quiz, I counter, leading to the inevitable giggles from my 21-year-old audience who really should know better.

But again, I digress. A quiz must be reviewed. The February Monthly of 2011 was conducted, with great aplomb, by SEQC's lean, mean, fighting machine, Annie Sengupta. A petition is doing the rounds to call him Onibaba, but it finds few takers outside (or, for that matter, inside) the Bong community, and fans of 1960s Japanese horror movies. Everybody was warned beforehand that the quiz would be long, so we brought overnight bags and provisions befitting a small army.

The quiz, itself, was an excellent one, with workable questions that left many a bearded quizzer tearing out his hair once the answer was revealed. Divided into ten subjects, teams got to choose one, from which six questions would be asked, following the now standard Infinite Bounce system. Now, I'm not a big fan of subject based quizzes, but Annie compensated by making even the questions within the sets diverse. There was also a theme round that mostly flew over the cuckoo's nest, with no team cracking it. And there were a few sitters, and a couple of contentious decisions, but this reviewer only complains because he didn't get them.

Unlike recent quizzes, which have mostly been close affairs, this one saw one team running away with it near the end. And it was "Secret Santa" Sajan Venniyoor - who'd come down from Delhi - who drove his team, with some stunning answers, to a comfortable victory, winning back some of the goodies that he had generously (and anonymously) donated to SEQC in the past.

A quiz like that is a tough act to follow, but this reviewer will try his best to do so next month. And keeping with Goa's quizzing revolution, there's much more before that. Quizzing will flow through the barrel of a gun as Twenty Paces comes to a climax on 20th February, and the Madgaonkars will host their second monthly on the 26th. Be there, or be square.