The Need for Speed

We had the first NFS:Hot Pursuit II tournament in our campus a couple of days back. I guess its the first ever computer game tournament we've ever conducted here. It was simply awesome. There were about 48 people who participated in the first round. About 16 - including yours turly - qualified for the semi-finals, and I lost out there. It was bound to happen since I was out of practice for years. 4 people went on to the finals which was a knock-out round.

The good part was the enthusiasm it generated. Loads of people queued up behind the screens and cheered up participants. It pretty much revived the gaming interests in a lot of people.

The best part was the tournament itself. We have almost a quiz every week conducted by students for students - ranging from Geography, Bollywood, Music, IT, Marketing, Finance, General Knowledge etc, apart from the innumerable JAMs, debates, block and tackles. The common thread in all of these is that everything was somehow acads or mind oriented. Nothing was for fun, excepting the physical game competitions conducted every year. But this event was pure fun. I personally feel this makes the whole competition system complete - catering to all types of people.

The organizers have promised more on the same lines: AOE, Unreal, Counter Strike, F1, Quake etc.

On a different note: It's disheartening to find that freedom of expression is something that's still a castle in the vacuum. Kaps has been doing a great job covering the incidents in Chennai involving questionable practices by the so-called moral police, while he himself is bothered by spam to his reviews of the latest newspaper. I can only empathize since I've witnessed similar stong threats because of posts. Even if you mention "Views are entirely personal", there seems to be no meaning to it. Sometimes, you really wonder how good it would be to live in countries where 'freedom of speech' really means something. Sigh!