By Siddharth Mishra
Jamshedpur: This is the story about two NIT Jamshedpur students, Palak Kumar and Sudeep Saurav, who overcame adversity and defied all odds to become the National Champions of Tata Crucible Campus Quiz 2017.
Tata Crucible, a business quiz organized by the Tatas since 2004, is divided in four levels, regional, zonals, nationals and international.
Jamshedpur being a well-known city in the quizzing circuit all over the nation, the prestigious quiz was mostly dominated by XLRI Jamshedpur until Palak Kumar and Sudeep Saurabh arrived at the stage. NIT Jamshedpur, ended XLRI’s reign in 2015 and then conquered everything left at the national stage.
The team of Palak and Sudeep became the first national champions from Jamshedpur, but the journey has been full of ups and downs. The journey disappointed them, made their heads rise. There were bad times, there were moments to cherish but one thing never lacked in their performance, which was consistency and hard-work.
“I was always inspired by my father. Even though I finished runners up in my first year and then won it three consecutive times, I feel like a four-time champion. It was always about being better than someone, who you previously were. Being national champion is one moment that will be there in my life forever,” says Palak. He had worked day in and day out, sacrificed his time with friends, and what not to be at a position he is today.
Sudeep was an avid quizzer in school but had to leave quizzing because of his wish to get into a good engineering college. But he started quizzing back in college because of his mentor Anurag Mehta. “The feeling that we are champions has slowly started to sunk in.
It’s tough to believe that we are currently the best business quizzers in the country. The people who have supported us are the only ones who know what we have been through. There have been times where we were knocked out and never got a chance to comeback. So we had to restart again, but now as we are national champions it is the respect we earned matters the most.” says Sudeep.
They prepared to win, and did not settle for anything inferior. Dedication, perseverance, and consistency has got them to a place they wanted, they prepared for Tata Crucible day and night, studied trivia, facts, made their own database and did everything they could to achieve this milestone. What people say that success does not come easy and they proved it through their hard-work.
“When we both sit in a quiz, we are not two different individuals. Rather we are a unit which functions together and we enjoy every time we quiz,” says Sudeep.
“It is not easy, and you will be sad, frustrated, you would not enjoy everything that you read but, your effort won’t go in vain. The only thing you need to do is start and be consistent at it, you do not need think about anyone else, or the results, just focus on yourself,” says Palak.
A Tata Bolt each, and Rs 5 lakh cash is what they get as prize money and on top of it the respect they earned at such a big platform. They won the national finals, while AFMC Pune, finished as runners up.
The International finals was won by the team of AFMC Pune, where Palak and Sudeep finished fourth. Over 7000 students, over 38 cities had participated in the quiz and to be crowned national champions was something a team from Jamshedpur achieved.