Finally, Out!

It was a bit surprising for people to see me there on that stage. Not because they thought I couldn't do it. But because they had seen me 3 feet below last time. In the Anna Auditorium.

It was Hindi Antakshari's second round in which they had to first select 10 teams out of 25 and then 5 out of the 10. And finally 2, for the inter-college finals in the Riviera, VIT's annual festival.

Last two years I had been in the organisation of the Hindi Antakshari and had prepared questions for it. But this time I decided to participate instead of organising. And finally I was a participant in the pre-final round of the Rs 10,000 contest.

The proceedings were all intersting. 26th Dec, we were given a written paper in which there were certain questions related to songs and movies. 25 teams were selected from almost 80 present, among which I was in the first. Yesterday the game started with those 25 teams and the teams were divided into 5 pools of 5 teams each. Knock-out antakshari was played in 5 corners of the rectangular Anna Auditorium and 3 teams were eliminated from every pool, sending 10 teams for the next, rapid fire questions' round. The rapid fire was easy for me as I've been pretty much okay woth such types of questions. Hence I replied 3 questions out of 4 fast enough. And after the rapid fire round, the results showed that 4 out of 5 teams were final years' and all of them from my friends' circle, the Mohalla.

Here I would like to say thanks to the administraion of the show for keeping everything fair and open because otherwise, 4 teams from the same group can be questionable at times.

Anyways, we were celebrating one another on the stage as we came up and I had to agree with the statement made by Udayan, the main organiser, that 'Experience matters'. So, there we were, Me, with Vishal and Abhishek on my team, the second team comprising of Dhruv, Jayant, and Mohan, the third - our least expected team - of Parry (Pradyut), Jeet, and Tyagi (Amit), the fourth one - a second year team, and the final one, of Ritvik, Apoorv, and Ankita.

The game started and went smoothly for the first two rounds and we were on top with jayant's team. In the third round we couldn't guess the song we were given after listening to the music, and we came equal to other two teams. In the next two rounds, the second year team went ahead of us and we were on second with Jayant and team.

And now, since there could be only two teams in the final according to our college, we had to go through a tie breaker. We did. And both the teams couldn't answer the first question. Tie again. The next question was answered by both the teams this time. Tie again. This time it was a mixture of two videos with some other song in background. We couldn't get both the videos correct. And finally, Out!

Anyways, the game was really enjoyable and it was a great scene when 80% of the stage captured by the 'Mohalla'. At last, the game was a memorable experience which will last long in my memory.