It is never a good sign for the coordinator to fall ill a week off from APOGEE and it certainly did not bode well for this article either. However, through a few clever tweaks to the questionnaire, which mostly involved changing mentions of “coordinator” to “joint coordinator”, we sat down with Aditya Bhaskar, the joint coordinator of ELAS to gain some valuable insight into the workings of the club.

Aditya, or Bhaskar as he’s usually called, was gracious enough to take the writer to a makeout spot for the interview. Once he got comfortable, he proceeded to explain the events to be organised by the club for this edition of APOGEE. The five quizzes to be organised are Overhead Transmission, Business Quiz, F1 Quiz, and Brain of BITS (BoB). Overhead Transmission shall be hosted by Major Chandrakant Nair, a reputed quizmaster and a regular fixture in ELAS events. As a kernel event, it comes with a substantial prize pool of INR 32,000. Business Quiz is being hosted by Aryapriya Ganguly. BoB is a solo quiz, which Bhaskar termed ‘an enjoyable nightlong endeavour’. In accordance with tradition, this edition of BoB is being hosted by the previous winner— Anirudh “Sax” Menon, to bring some joy to his intellectually deprived life at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Bhaskar seemed very excited for the one event that was not organised solely by ELAS— the F1 Quiz, organised in collaboration with Inspired Karters Electric.

To feel better about his loneliness at ELAS, Bhaskar stated that he wished to introduce a “Quizzing Week” to reclaim the pre-COVID glory of the club.

Bhaskar had a heartfelt conversation about the issues ELAS had faced as a club. The two major issues he highlighted were the lack of minions and the lack of dough, to publicise ELAS quizzes beyond the average ELASi.

When asked about the sort of work remaining in the last few days leading up to the fest, Aditya spoke a bit about last minute revisions of the quizzes and the need to publicise the quizzes adequately, before dropping all pretence and saying, ‘Actually to be honest, I have not done any ELAS work for the past like one-two weeks (sic) toh, it’s very lite.’

On a parting note, Aditya agreed that while ELAS quizzes do have a reputation of being challenging, he encourages everyone to attend saying, ‘So I (sic), I actually plead no, not plead, maybe. But I implore them to come and attend the quizzes. It will be fun’ not realising that switching out ‘plead’ for ‘implore’ had made his appeal more submissive.