Corporate Quiz Results - Bangalore

ITC and Tata Elxsi Win Bangalore
Bangalore, Aug 31, 2008: If a book were to be written about this leg of the TATA Crucible quiz the title would sure read, “A tale of Debutants and Comebacks.” Every single person who left the auditorium on a down pouring Sunday evening took with them the glimpses of what perhaps was a rerun of a Federer v/s Nadal final at the Wimbledon, except on a different turf and with the Battle of the Minds.

The prelim was a varied mix of questions from across subjects and the Bangalore crowd wanted the Pickbrain not to make anyone’s life easy with clues. For the first time in the history of Crucible, barring the city of Jamshedpur where they have no representation, the finalist for the Internal Track of the quiz did not feature TCS, perhaps a record in itself.

In the internal track final Titan(Shivram & Lakshana) who has dominated Bangalore for the last three editions finally met its match in Tata Elxsi (Ajay Rao & Nagaraj Keshavmurthy ). From the word go Tata Elxsi’s consistent performance secured the title of Regional Winners of Bangalore. The runner up was another team from Titan(Harish Bhat & ), incidentally Mr. Harish Bhat is also the COO of Titan, and Pickbrain did give the audience some inside info of how Mr. Bhat enjoys being a participant at Corporate Crucible than be the one giving away the prizes.

The External Track final followed, and the six teams that made it to the final were.

ITC – Thanmay Prusty & Anindiya Sen
Ray + Keshavan – Aditya Jalan & Arvind Hegde
National Instruments – Abhishek Nag & Shilendra Bhattacharya
Yahoo! – Ajay Kasargoad & Tejaswi Udupa
OnMobile – Nikhil Narayan & Rajesh Mohan
Oracle – Anantharam Vaidyanath & Rohan Balakrishnan

The final looked evenly poised for the first four rounds with Yahoo!(defending champions of Bangalore) holding a slender lead over ITC and Oracle. Like the saying goes “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”- ITC bounced right back by going for every question in the final round to ensure they not only won the quiz but also a chance to compete against the 15 other regional winners from across the country. The last round heroics of ITC made for one of the most memorable last round victories recorded at TATA Crucible. The other team which kept pace with the two was Oracle but not taking risks cost them in the end.

Despite the rain, the huge number of audience that turned out for the quiz answered some brilliant questions to take home some great prizes. Not only were there the regular suspects, the corporate teams, but alongside were School students of eleventh.