Luck? No chance!

"Luck favours the brave" said somebody and mind you this saying makes me feel timid. Not that I am one, but when luck just declines to side by you one can't help wondering.

Somebody else went on to say "Success is 99% persevearance and 1% chance", but in my case the lesser share seems to have much higher bearing than that 99%.

You must be wondering what am I talking about? Well, its about me missing to make it to the finals of quizzes by a whisker. Passionate that I am for quizzing and more so the dedication with which I quiz, I modestly beleive I deserve a much better deal.

Its not been just any ordinary event that I missed to make it to the big stage, and more so its not once or twice but third time. And adding insult to injury is the margin I have been missing out on. up, its been a single point, a half at times and worst zero point (this time missing on the starred question).

Its all started with the Brand Equity Quiz. After much coaxing our HR/admin to shell out the seemingly big amount from their cofers to sponsor us, we had travelled all the way to pune to participate in the regional round. Crazy that I am for the quiz, I surely didnt mind the bumpy overnight ride to the venue, more so when it was such a big ticket event on corporate quizzing circle in India. Reaching there, and decently attempting the written preliminaries to pick the final six; we realised we had to attend the rest of the quiz sitting in the audience and not rest our bumps on the dias. Guess what was the point difference between the coveted seat on the stage and the one in the audience? A single point had made all the difference. All we won that evening was an appreciation by the QM Derek O'Brien for reaching so near (yet so far...), a round of applause from the audience, and some crapy frying pan as consolation prizes. And ha, we had definitely won a sleepless night that evening, coz all we did that entire night was the post-mortem of what went wrong?

Next, came the TATA crucible-corporate edition. This time the organising people had chosen Goa as one of its venue and thus spared us the trouble of a bus-ride to the nearest destination. It was the first time TC was coming to Goa, and all I had to do is find someone to partner with. In absence of my usual partner who had shifted base out of goa, I had to hook onto another of those brainy fella who I had came across at SEQC (FYI, SEQC is the quizzing club in goa. Do visit http://www.seqc.blogspot.com/ for more details). New Quiz, new venue and new partner, but still my bad luck didnt seem to have stopped chasing me wherever I went. Infact, this time round I seemed to be at the abyss. After another fair show at the prelims, came the time to evaluate the answers. I realised that my score was same as another team from SEQC and they were the first team to be called on stage. Almost certain of a berth on the stage, my hopes started fading as the places started get filled. In the end, all I realised was that I had tied on the score but was eliminated on the starred question (for those oblivious to quizzing, the starred question is one which is considered for resolution of a tie).I just could not fathom that, but it was the reality and the sooner I came to terms with it the better it was for me. Again the largesse of the QM Giri 'pickbrain' subramaniam won me a lousy T-shirt.

Well, turn of the year and there was another first in the history of quizzing in goa. Tata Crucible was back, this time it was the campus edition. And thanks to my executive MBA program, I was eligible to participate in this too. Trying to find a partner for this one was a bit difficult though. Leave aside being interested, people in my batch were seemingly allergic to the very utterance of the word 'quiz'. In such scenario, my only hope was teaming up with some from the full-time batch. I did spread a word that I was on a look-out for a partner but finally what did the trick for me was a mail over the alias. Emerged a guy with a faintish quizzing halo. A series of mis-communication is all we had to go through before landing up at the venue for the quiz. This time round a much better showing at the prelims thanks to relative simple dossier of question. I guess the QM was testing the waters as this was the first campus edition of TC at Goa. First time it was for the quiz edition but wasnt so for my bad-run. It had been continuing since a while now. What came to haunt me this time round was a new format to see equitable representation for different colleges/ institutions and that the dias doesnt look like a classroom of any individual institution. But this format, pre-informed and unbiased that it was, saw teams scoring much lesser than ours ending on stage. And I did not have to face the hardship to change the audience seat that I was seated on. And once again it was a single point that made all the difference. Thankfully, this time round the QM didnt have any special words of appreciation for us though answering an audience question landed me another lousy T-shirt with "TC campus quiz 2009" embroideried onto it to remind me these bitter memoirs which as it is i wont have forgotten.

So here I am, feeling like a complete loser. Quizzing has been a field which I devour but such upsets do sometimes act as a dampener. But as the funda of my life says "All for the best", I choose to see something positive out of it and be as optimistic as I ever am. Hopefully I will break the jinx, sooner the better.