As is custom with ELAS quizzes, Oasis Quiz, OQ for short, began at midnight, with bleary eyed-people trying to participate in the quiz, kept awake only by their enthusiasm for quizzing. Fuelling himself with a few cans of Monster energy drink, the quizmaster Kushan Patel inched through the preliminary round steadily. Kushan Patel has been to BITS Pilani thrice before, and said that he has thoroughly enjoyed being here for a fourth time. To him it is the culture at BITS Pilani, not just within ELAS, but also among BITS’ students as a whole that endears BITS Pilani to him. 

Kushan Patel works for QryptiQ, and works on advertisement and knowledge dissemination programs. They make content for the Heritage India quizzes, the IMA quizzes, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica quizzes. It was therefore no surprise when quizzers were presented with a very well balanced preliminary elimination round, with questions ranging from topics like Karen’s managerial escapades, to vampires, and Mona Lisa. Kushan Patel’s expertise truly shone through when having to deal with 10 teams after the eliminations, a sizeable number for any quizzing finals.

Attendance this year was as good as the previous years, with a few teams from other colleges also participating, but the overwhelming majority of teams were from BITS. The finals were a tough three round challenge, with two sixteen question terminating bounce/pounce rounds sandwiching one written round of five questions. After a fiercely contested quiz that ended at six in the morning, the quizmaster had his last bow for the night and declared Nandagopal V, Trivikram C, and Harsh K. the winners, with the crowd then dispersing to their various haunts for the night, all of them content with a thoroughly entertaining quiz.