When James Daly, a humble theatre manager, decided to popularize the word quiz, little did he know that millions and millions of people are going to be hooked to it forever.

The fervor was evident during “Funda”mentals, a general quiz exclusive for freshers conducted by Acumen, the Quizzing and Debating Society at the K.J. SIMSR. The quiz was intended as a welcome gift and it did turn out to be a wonderful one. “Funda” quizzing is a form of quizzing which has gained popularity in colleges due to the fact that the answers are workable from the question and is a lot of fun at the same time. Loosely speaking a Funda is an interesting fact at the heart of a question. Every good question contains a little nugget that tells something that one didn’t know already. With these “Funda”mentals,  it was a fun-filled and event evening. The event received an overwhelming response with more than 110 quizzing enthusiasts participating in it.

The quiz was designed in two phases: Preliminary round and the finals. Preliminary round had a total of 26 questions which was aimed to check the familiarity of the participants across topics such as current affairs, sports, business, and entertainment. The questions were in the A-Z format wherein the first question’s answer started with the letter A, second with B and so on… This ensured that all the participants could really rack their hands and come up with some clever guesses. After a lot of hushed murmurs, animated gestures and plenty of Eureka moments later, top six teams were arrived but not before a round of sudden death for the last spot.

The finals were designed to up the notch in terms of quizzing standard and the finalists responded in fine style. Various new formats such as Connect, Dries, Pounce and Bounce which are the norm in B- school quizzes were introduced to the participants which they lapped up eagerly. It was phased out over a total of five rounds which saw some brain racking questions, brilliant answers and some entertaining guesses. After rounds of nail biting tension, and not one, not two, but after five tie-breakers on the trot, Mayank Kalkar and Mihir Daryapurkar from International Business (IB) emerged victorious. That they pulled this out after trailing the entire quiz is a testimony to the quality of the finalists. The audience too had their share of fun with questions for them and lots of chocolates.

Prof. Debraj Ghosal and Prof. Dipika Attavar, faculty mentors of Acumen took time out of their busy schedule to come and grace the event and highlighted the importance of such extra-curricular activities. If an event was measured by the enthusiasm displayed, then “Funda”mentals was a rousing success. This will motivate Acumen to come up with more shows and in turn hope that students continue to turn up in large numbers for subsequent events.