The Hindu Business Line : Of yellow knights and cubicle envy

The winners of the Ad Club-Business Line quiz finals held in Chennai, Ram Kumar (second from right) and Kesari Prasad (extreme right) of Chemplast-Sanmar, greeting the runners-up Ajay Kasargod (second from left) and Mitesh Agarwal (extreme left) of Cipher. Quizmaster Suresh Kumar looks on.

NO one, neither the undisputed winners of the Ad Club Business Line Quiz 2004, nor the enthusiastic sponsors or the experienced quizmaster, could have demonstrated what the event did to the venerable quizzing circuit better than Avinash Mudaliar. A regular at Bangalore quizzes, Avinash narrowly missed out on the top two spots in the Bangalore leg of the quiz — a prerequisite for a place in the grand finals — but travelled to Hyderabad and then to Chennai to try his luck but couldn't even reach the city finals.

He was, however, not to go empty-handed, as he bagged an audience prize, defining the Red Queen principle right. The principle — quite coincidentally portraying his own situation, as quiz-master Suresh Kumar quipped — is based on an observation made by the Red Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where she says that "in this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." The incident represents the importance of a no-frills, affordable business quiz such as this in the land of quiz freaks.

For the record, the 2004 edition, presented by the Union Bank of India, was clinched with ease by the Chemplast Sanmar duo of A. H. Kesari Prasad and Ramkumar Shankar. Cipher and i-flex finished second and third. The Chemplast duo was in great form with jargon, cracking questions on `yellow knights,' `cubicle envy' and `word of thumb' — all part of the Amity round, named after the business school which was also the academic partner. Yellow knights refer to corporates who start off with the intention of a hostile takeover but chicken out and negotiate a merger instead. Cubicle envy is straight from the dotcom boom days, when persons joining a company late found themselves next to early joiners with bigger gains from stock options. And word of thumb is marketing via SMS.

Suresh Kumar, who has been conducting the Business Line Quiz for the past 10 years, kept the boisterous crowd at Hotel Savera (hospitality sponsor) in good humour with a host of goodies, courtesy co-sponsors including Amco, Reynolds, ITC, Club Mahindra and Titan, along with a host of regional sponsors.

While this year's quiz, which attracted a record number of 150 corporate and business schools teams, was a roaring success, the organisers have promised a bigger and, of course, a better event next year.

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