Who can stop Mr Rai?

No one. Rajiv Rai stormed to yet another win in the latest BQC quiz, conducted yesterday by AP Alagarsamy. This time, he was a tease. His team was behind throughout the quiz, and just when the result seemed a foregone conclusion, he cracked the last three questions to take home maximum points. It was almost like he said to the others, "You can dream, you can dream. But in the end, I'll wake you up." Drat.

The team I was in, with Prasann Potdar, Vibhendu Tiwari and Sarat Rao, was the one jostled awake. We took an early lead, extended it, dreamed of victory speeches, and then had the champagne gently taken away from us. This was my fifth second place of the season. Pah.

Sumant Srivathsan's team ended up third, a position which was within everyone's reach in a well-contested quiz. The questions were mostly workoutable. A Spanish instrument named after an almond because of its shape? Mandolin. A kind of gem whose name is today used as meaning a model of excellence? Paragon. And so on.

The results:

1st with 30 points
Rajiv Rai
Sritanu Chakravarty
Sowmya Ramaswamy

2nd with 27.5 points
Amit Varma
Prasann Potdar
Vibhendu Tiwari
Sarat Rao

3rd with 20 points
Sumant Srivathsan
Mukund Krishnan
Chitra Raghunath
Kartik R

4th with 19.5 points
S Balakrishnan
Ameya Samant
Arnab Bhattacharya
Dhritiman Borkakoti

5th with 19 points
Kartik Srivatsa
Rahul Bhaskar
Suchintan Chatterjee
Kedar Shastry

6th with 17 points
Anand Sivasankar
Samrat Sengupta
Devang Ghia
Abilil Mukherjee

7th with 16 points
Pradeep Ramarathnam
Ravi Venkatesh
Francis Rodrigues

8th with 14.5 points
Ajith Prabhakar
Udatta Duarah
Prateek Chaturvedi
Sarayu Natarajan

And now, the standings:

BQC Season Two Standings (from 12 quizzes, as of October 14, 2007)

79.5 points
Rajiv Rai (from 10 quizzes)

48 points
Ashwan Lewis (7)
Prasann Potdar (8)

47.5 points
Rishi Iyengar (9)

45 points
Amit Varma (9)

29 points
Pradeep Ramarathnam (9)

28 points
Mahesh Murthy (6)
AP Alagarsamy (9)
S Balakrishnan (8)

27 points
Sumant Srivathsan (8)

26.5 points
Mukund Krishnan (5)

26 points
Govind Grewal (9)

24 points
Amit Pandeya (9)
Anand Sivasankar (10)
Kartik Srivatsa (5)

22 points
Ajith Prabhakar (10)
Vibhendu Tiwari (10)

20.5 points
Ameya Samant (10)

18 points
Kedar Shastry (8)
Kartik R (?)
Sarat Rao (?)

17 points
Ravi Venkatesh (6)

16.5 points
Dhananjay Shettigar (9)

15 points
Devang Ghia (10)

14 points
Samrat Sengupta (4)

11 points
Ajay Ravindran (3)
Meghashyam Shirodkar (2)
Nandan Krishnaswamy (5)
Avinash Mudaliar (6)

10 points
Aravinda Talluri (1)
Neeraj (1)
Nilesh Jain (1)
Tanmay Sharma (2)
Gaurav Singh (1)
Raghu (?)
Sritanu Chakravarty (1)
Sowmya Ramaswamy (1)

8 points
Hanisha Vaswani (5)

7 points
Akshay Mahajan (1)
Rahul Bhaskar (3)
Saurav (?)

4 points
Francis Rodrigues (7)
Padma Sinha (3)
Pranav Kukreja (1)
Sireesh Talluri Rao (5)
Sushant Raut (5)
Udatta Duarah (3)
Chitra Raghunath (1)

1 point
Souvik Basu (?)

The next quiz will be conducted by Samrat Sengupta on October 21. Watch this space for more details.