Arrive at Mata Jai Kaur Public School: drum-guy of the marching band wearing the exact same sash as our head boys and head girls – totally ditto, same chatai material, colour, knot and everything. This school calls its computer competition Cyberfest (as you would probably have noticed), but wait, its computer club is called WHIZKIDZ. Next, they don’t even have an auditorium; we were seated in a Pandaal, which would be more suited to a langar than a computer competition. The chief guest looked like he was the school’s peon, with his chaprasi clothes and simply horrid grammar. We did ourselves the courtesy of not listening to him, and instead munching on our lunch boxes (in my case, of course, munching on other peoples’ tiffins).

The first event was Senior Quiz Preliminary Round. I was quite pissed off because it started an hour late, and Bhavya was even more pissed off, because after seeing the question paper, he realised that it was all technical. I managed to get sixteen out of twenty questions pucca right, guessed on three and left one.

Result: We got the first position in the written preliminaries.

The second event was Linux Programming. I’ve always thought of myself as a seriously pathetic programmer at computer symposia, who couldn’t program even to save his life. That changed today. It was Linux programming of course, which means that there’s less of logic and more of “knowledge”. You have to “know” the arcane commands in Linux. For example, in normal computer languages like C++ and BASIC, ‘if’ statements are either if…else, if..then..else, or if…then…else…end if, but in Linux, it’s if…then…elif…fi. Sorry to geek you people out, but it simply looks stupid. Here’s where we prospered. You see, Mr. Azgez (Exun Programmer 2004-05) agreed to learn these arcane commands and so he did, and with efficiency, over the weekend. Hence, we were the only team to actually type something meaningful on the computer. The logic for all the questions was easy, but we couldn’t attempt one question due to knowledge and time restraints.

Result: Came first

Third event was Extemporé. I’m really not good at it. I got a topic like “Computers have destroyed writing form and expression.” I occupied two minutes of the judges’ time and got out.

Result: Nothing

In totality, both the quizzing teams qualified, no one qualified for extemporé, we bagged Linux but those hapless tenthies and ninethies couldn’t win a thing, neither the digital imaging competition (apparently, in which, they lost their file) nor in hardware assembly (in which they put in the CD-ROM drive upside down).

–Karan Misra

President, Exun