All Hail the King - Post by Shyam Shreyas

Manas Wi, as he calls himself now, walks up to a bunch of QuizCorpers, as we call ourselves, after a UTPT quiz, and goes, “Nice quizzes da. We have the Arbitarium, the Sports Quiz and the General Quiz at Utsav. You guys should come.” Varun hits him with, “You guys should really call these the Arbitarium, the Arbit Sports, and the Arbit General Quizzes.”

The King, may he rest in peace, always was quick-witted and sharp-tongued. Once you got to know him better, you realized that he applied the same rules to himself and was always a sport about being the butt of jokes, poor and great impressions of his rants included. He was one of the ‘cool’ quizzers, at least by my definition of having fun while quizzing than indulge in it as it were the competitive sport we often make it out to be.

He was a loyal friend, who always kept in touch and loved hanging with QC whenever he could. Datta, Cry and I met for a drink a few months before I left Bangalore and I have revisited that evening many times over in the last few hours. When I called him on one of the UTPT 2011 nights, he wrote back thanking me for the call and told me he missed hanging with QC during UTPT the most.

Being one of the ‘responsible’ seniors of QuizCorp, I am fairly certain that Kryptos (guess I’d have to explain, Kryptonite/Kryptos is my team at QC, I refuse to use the past tense here) had a significant role in introducing Varun to the ‘pleasures’ that the world had to offer and watch him grow up. He always was a fun drunk. I’m sure Jose, Soda and Raj have more stories to recount about Cry’s antics at NITK/IIT/Any given quiz fest where he was drunk.

Maybe I would have had more stories to talk about had I stayed in touch as he often pestered me to. The guilt hangs heavy. The last conversation I had with him, he was telling me how he would have loved to be in NY with the rest of us, but circumstances dictated otherwise. We had a minor disagreement, but looking back, I know I was wrong.

The King had a penchant for poking people in the eye to size them up and take them on. This time, he went too far.