Corporates, both domestic and multinationals, competed spiritedly on Thursday at ‘Cerebration’, the Business Line Quiz.
The duo of J. Rahul and A.G.K. Murthy from the public sector Visakhapatnam Steel Plant comfortably won the Hyderabad regional round.
The Vizag-based team will now head for the national finals in Mumbai on January 26. The top six finalists who tested their business knowledge included Novartis, Reckitt & Benckiser, TCS, Infosys, Sai Mitra Construction and VSP at the Hotel Golkonda. A total of 38 teams participated in the event.
Quiz master Giri ‘Pickbrain’ Balasubramaniam was at his best as he measured his questions well to test the Hyderabadi quizzers, who, according to him, were of high standard.
While his question on who recently launched “hair yoga”, got an answer in a jiffy — Javed Habib (the hair stylist, who runs the salon chain), the next one stumped the teams. What is “ruff yoga”, for which in the US there is a wait list.
The answer came from the knowledgeable audience. It is yoga for dogs. Giri said, if the dog in the house is silent, it implies the family is happy. To achieve this, classes in yoga were being offered to the pet at a whopping price.
Another one which got a brilliant answer from the contestants was: Which Nobel Prize winning scientist also has a patent on Toblerone? It is Albert Einstein.
The next one, was one of the toughest of the contest, where questions were sourced from the pages of Business Line . According to latest research, which was the ideal position where the customer was most likely to take a positive decision at shopping.
The answer, the typically Indian position of “sitting on chadars ”. It is akin to the scene in most, traditional Indian shops vending jewellery, apparel etc, he said. US Institutes, including the University of Syracuse, spent over half a million dollars to arrive at this interesting finding. The Zonal Head of Corporation Bank, D Purnachandra Rao and Branch Manager of SAIL gave away the prizes to the winners.
The title sponsor for the quiz is Corporation Bank, while associate sponsors are SAIL and NCDEX. Hotel Golkonda is the hospitality partner and gifts for audience were sponsored by Raymond Weil, AppTabs and Lawrence & Mayo.
Somasekhar.m@thehindu.co.in