Krishnakant Prasad and Royce Cherian Thomas from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Bangalore, beat the Coimbatore teams to emerge winners at the regional round of the Business Line Corporate Quiz – Cerebration at Coimbatore.
The TCS team scored 60 points and pushed the Coimbatore champions — the team from Chennai Silks — to the second place.
With this win, the two teams from TCS — winners from the regional round in Chennai and Coimbatore — will enter the national finals of the quiz in Mumbai. Incidentally, Coimbatore has emerged as the first city to have a B-School team qualify to the regional round of corporate quiz.
Quiz master ‘Pickbrain’ Giri Balasubramaniam said the KCT Business School team comprising Sri Hari and Mohan K. V. scored better than some of the corporates who participated in the preliminary round.
But luck was not in their favour. After the electrifying rounds, Mohan and Sri Hari, who failed to open their account, told this correspondent that the very fact that they qualified in the preliminary round, kept them dumb. “We knew the answers to most of the questions, but were not quick enough to respond. The glare of the camera on the one hand and the audience on the other made us jittery,” said Sri Hari
No cake walk
During the tea break (immediately after the preliminary round), a good number of participants confessed that it was no cake walk.
Giri, however, said the scores were on par with that in Chennai or Hyderabad. The number of participating teams might be less here, but quality certainly seems to be the better side of Coimbatore, he added.
While teams from Vellore and Bangalore made it all the way to Coimbatore to participate in the regional round of Cerebration, the quiz master felt the number of participating teams was rather thin here because this city had a national champion in Chennai Silks in Corporate quiz.
“This could be one reason why contestants prefer to travel to Bangalore or Hyderabad in the South, rather than loose out to the champions here,” he said.
The wrong move
The team from Chennai Silks had a clear edge over others in the initial three rounds — Roots and Shoots, Windows and New Manager. But one wrong move (guess) earned them a negative score and they were pushed to the second place.
The title sponsor for the quiz is Corporation Bank, while associate partners are NCDEX and SAIL.
Le Meridien is the hospitality partner and gifts for the audience were sponsored by Raymond Weil, AppTabs and Lawrence & Mayo