Symposium Saga 2010 Episode 1 : Short Notice (MINET)

Saturday, 14 August 2010, 7 am. Jogging in the park behind my house. Phone rings.

Mihir: Yaar Mrinal, aaj free hai?

Me: Haan. kyun?

Mihir: Sorry yaar, thoda short notice ho gaya. Abhi pata chala aaj MINET hai. Chalega?

Me: WHAT THE F**K

And so begins the IT symposium season of 2010.

I owe you some background, so here you go: I’m a Class XII student of DPS Noida, the president of its computer club, eSpice, and well, hot. Schools in Delhi (and elsewhere, for that matter) organize annual IT symposiums comprising events like quiz, photoshopping, music-mixing, movie-making and Stuff. They are pretty fun and I’ve been doing well in the quizzes and the Photoshop events.

I promised myself to go to fewer events this season, mainly because of studies. Missed the ones at Montfort (G@teway), BVB and MSM (Matrix EComm). So, MINET at Mother’s International was to be the first. Back to where I left:

Reached school in an auto and joined by Tushant Jhaat Jha, the super-Maths- programming guy and Mihir Paul a.k.a. BedBoy Head Boy, my quizzing partner and a good gamer as well. Turns out that nobody else can come at such short notice, but Mihir really wants someone to go for Gaming (Gaming and Quiz clash, so he can’t go). We call up Lohit Nagpal, the most awesomest FIFA player and above average CS player

Mihir: Aaj MINET hai. Daud ke school aa. (He lives behind the school)

Lohit: Meri FIITJEE hai aaj.

Mihir: BHAP! DAUD KE AA!!

Lohit succumbs and reaches school and 5 minutes. We take an auto to Mother’s International, and reach 10 minutes after registration closing time. Fortunately, this is India, so after running through the entrance (which incidentally, has a grocery store and what looked like a clinic) we reach the reception desk and they (obviously) relent. Turns out that only 6 schools showed up for the event and we are alternating between cursing the event’s size and praising our chances of actually winning something.

Surprise Event is first up. Its an open event which clashes with nothing else, so everyone from the school (4 in our case) took part. It was a Maths+logic+shit paper which had questions like “How many times does a clock’s hands get superimposed in a day”

Me: WTF. THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN IT SYMPOSIUM, FOR GOD’S SAKE!

Anyway, I lost interest in it, but believed Tushant would crack it, being the Maths guy and all. After the event, Me and Mihir stayed on for the Quiz Prelims while Tushant went for Programming with Lohit. The prelims were a mixed bunch, ranging from acronyms to visual like:

Me: I’ve seen this!!! I can’t remember where. SHIT!

Mihir: Think, dude, think!

Me: I think it started with Alt or something

Mihir: Altair?

Me: Bang On!

And then there were sitters like Turing Machine, Jaron Lanier’s oxymoronic term and total “I don’t have a clue ones” like IRIX, Futzing and full form of VIRUS (For the record any fullform of virus is supposed to be an unofficial backronym, MINET morons) (We wrote Viru Sahastrebuddhe)

After the prelims were wrapped up, we checked out the school canteen the grocery store. Had a few bars and drinks (as in chocolate bars and soft drinks), caught up with  the Vasant Kunj guys i.e. Vivek Nair, Karthick, Aditya Kumar and Co. (who tried to scare us into believing that the upcoming Code Wars at VK would actually be challenging). At one point we stumbled across a hall where a couple of MINET guys were playing FIFA on a Wii. We began talking about something in that hall which led to Aditya Kumar proclaiming that I’m gay. (I’m not)

Aditya: Dude. You are gay.

Me: No, man. Wii is gay.

Pun unintentional.

The results of the three events were out. We didn’t qualify for the second round of Surprise Event (which was, infact, a FIFA match on Wii), nor for programming. (We can’t win an event attended by 6 schools = We suck.) We did qualify for the quiz finals though, unsurprising since we’ve had podium finishes for the last 7 quizzes (excluding TCS IT Wiz Delhi 2009, where instead of me, a classmate won the first prize). The most excruciating mistake we made in the prelims was of the pic above.

Quizmaster: And that pic was Alt..

Me and Mihir: Oh Yeah!

Quizmaster: Alto. Xerox Alto.

Me and Mihir: F**K! Wasn’t it Altair?

Quizmaster: Altair didn’t even have a screen.

Yeah. Whatever. We qualified, so its okay.

The quiz finals began in another room while Lohit went for gaming. We had no one for Group Discussion OR Web Designing OR PPT, so were just hoping to win the quiz.

The finals (6 teams) were good, an infinite bounce of ~30 questions followed by a visual round. I don’t really remember the questions (the event was a week ago), but the team from RKP got into the lead first and maintained it throughout the quiz. We answered some nice ones relating to charging batteries with urine and and bot which ran on H-cells and stuff, alongwith a few sitters like the developer of Bada OS. By the end, us, DPS VK, and DPS-RKP team 2 were on a tie for second (and third) place. The quizmaster gave us 3 questions, whose answers we had write on paper and show it to him. Maximum (correct) answers in minimum time wins.

Q. Which wireless signal uses the 2.45 GHz frequency?

Q. Who said that he was a total as***ole in computers in 10th grade?

Q. How do we better know the Victor Company of Japan?

2.45 GHz reminded me of the radio frequency of 2.4 GHz and I was sure it was either WiFi or WiMax. The second one could either be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. No one else makes such quotes. No clue about the third.

We wrote WiFi, Steve Jobs and Samsung. All wrong. But everyone else’s too.

Now instead of giving us new questions, the FatGuy (quizmaster is a long word) told us to just guess randomly on the 3 questions. Halfway through the guess, he picked up Nair-Karthick’s paper and said that he had one answer correct but he couldn’t “decipher their handwriting the first time” Way to go. They came 2nd. But its still a tie for third place. Fatso asks us to just randomly guess the answer aloud (weirdest quiz ever, I tell you). Me and Mihir are fast and not shy in any manner, so we blurt out, before RKP could even open their mouth:

Me: WiMax!

Fatso: No.

Me: ZigBee!

Fatso: No.

Me: BLUETOOTH!

Fatso: Yo.

iFTW. There wasn’t a trophy for the third place, just a piece of paper certificate, but we managed to smile. Lohit came third as well, so the trip wasn’t as bad as expected.

We were wrong.

After the event, Mihir took an auto for his East Delhi home, while Me-Tushant-Lohit were looking for a way to the nearest Metro station to get back to Noida. We figured we’ll take an auto to the station.

The Heavens burst.

Rain, like you’ve never imagined, was upon us, and we were in the middle of a road, no shelter in sight, screaming for an auto. There were hundreds. And they were all full. We spotted a bridge and took shelter for nearly half-an-hour, shouting for a taxi/auto/bus/whatever, whenever one passed. As fate would have it, all our drivers were on a holiday today and Dads busy somewhere.

35 minutes later.

We finally found an auto and jumped in like a tiger on a deer boarded it.

Me: Sabse paas waale Metro station le chalo

Autowaala: Bhaiyaa. Aaj 2 baje se kal 2 baje tak metro band hai.

Me: FML.

We were short of cash, so taking the auto to Noida wasn’t an option, so we went THE OPPOSITE WAY to Nehru Place , braving through the swamps on foot, and then took a Blueline to Noida, in what could be considered one of the most uncomfortable-st bus journeys of my life

It felt so good to be back in familiar territory.

Minutes later, we saw a Metro pass on the overhead track.

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