Quiz master Giri ‘Pickbrain' Balasubramaniam kept the questions coming thick and fast: Tough ones, esoteric ones, ones with simple but not obvious answers, and some real mind-benders. But, students from some of the top Chennai colleges and B-schools showed they were more than capable of handling it as the duo of Priyamvad Pattanayak and Ayyappa Kancherla from the Great Lakes Institute of Management (GLIM), won the inaugural Business Line Club BeeQee business quiz presented by Central Bank of India, handsomely with 80 points, a 20-point lead over SSN College of Engineering.

The team, which received their trophies from actor Karthi, who was greeted with a roar from the over 1,400 students present, pocketed Rs 40,000 in prize money, a Hero Honda motorbike each and lots of other prizes from a host of sponsors who were associated with the quiz. Govind Paliath and B.Saran from the SSN College of Engineering were second while R.G. Aishwarya and R. Saisundar from the College of Engineering Guindy were third.

Mr Balasubramaniam, commenting on the high standard of quizzing, said it was only in Chennai that a team which scored 60 points in four rounds could not win a quiz because there was yet another team in GLIM which cracked 80 points. A total of 609 teams took part in the preliminary round and six finalists were selected.

Mr Balasubramaniam, a seasoned quizzer, innovated on the format of the various rounds. Many questions were from the pages of Business Line . His first round had students click on various alphabets which make up Business Line and the question began with that letter and so did the answer that the students had to give. One of them had the students stumped and a student from the audience got it right: Izhmash, the quiz master asked, was a motorcycle manufacturing company but is now known the world over for some other product. The answer: the AK-47 rifle! Another one was cracked by Great Lakes for the letter ‘n'. What was flashed was the word Mobira. The answer to that is Nokia, which took over Mobira to enter the mobile phone business. A couple of other rounds such as Knowball and BrandLine took off from Business Line sections, with many questions from the newspaper.

Well-known radio jockey Dheena of 92.7 Big FM also went on stage to talk to the audience and had them in splits with his comments.

The title sponsor for the quiz was Central Bank of India; Associate Partner Edserv; Knowledge Partner, Excell Career India; TV partner, CNBC; Beverage Partner, Pepsi; Radio Partner 92.7 Big FM; memento partner, Kesar Gift Mart; Snacks by The Grand Sweets and Snacks. The prize sponsors were Hero Honda, Samsung, Fastrack, Reebok, Fitness One, Hotel Courtyard Marriot, Mahavir Optics, Uniball Mitsubishi Pencil.

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