April MHK - a post-event report

Since I was the one hosting the event, I will confine myself to the facts and leave all criticisms/ compliments to those less intimately concerned with the event.
To wit, that the following events did occur on Saturday, the 12th of April 2008:

1. Tharunya arrived at Brewhaha forty minutes ahead of schedule. She had meant to arrive only ten minutes ahead of time, but did not take into account the sparse traffic that might be expected at two in the afternoon on a weekend.
2. She called various people (Okay, she called four.) and discovered that some of them would arrive only at four, some thought the MHK was at four and some people's phones weren't even working. Hoorah!
   
3. She waited until five minutes to three, when she left the premises because she was politely reminded there was a limit to the amount of time one could spend in the establishment without ordering food.
4. Ujjwal arrived promptly at three and called Tharunya to find out where she was. Tharunya was properly impressed, but that did not prevent her from making a few unwanted remarks about his short story (i.e. gave away the plot, for e.g. to Sharmila).
5. The three members moved in and occupied a table right in view of the entrance. They were soon joined by (in approximate order of appearance) Annette, Ali, Poorna, Guru and Varun.
   
6. Orders were placed. In spite of advice to the contrary, Sharmila insisted on ordering the Inter-Galactic Gargle Blaster. Some amusement was derived from her facial expressions on tasting her drink. Some more amusement was derived from the facial expressions of those who were reading Ujjwal's story.
   
7. A slight diversion was caused when Ujjwal made disparaging remarks about women's ability to enter into feelings of love for inanimate objects, but he soon realized that he was both wrong and outnumbered.
   
8. The gang of eight moved to a corner of the café facing a large picture window. They were later glad to be there due to the excitement and screaming caused by unexplained acts of videotaping in the inner parts of BrewHaHa.
9. They were soon joined by Ananth, and once Kiran and Ravi arrived (at around 4.30 p.m.), the entire cast for the day's activities was present.
10. Games were played.
11. Some people left.
12. More games were played.
13. Everyone else left.

The Games:

We began with a mini-round of DC. The cards had names of South Indian movies (Languages covered - Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam) on them. Every movie name contained only four syllables, and the trick was to act out through phonetics only.

Once everyone had arrived, we moved into the Quiz. This consisted of four rounds of word games. The first two were crossword-clue rounds, and the others were anagrams and kangaroo words. We had five teams of two members each. Most teams managed to solve a number of puzzles, and a couple of teams got them all. :)
No wonder we're in Mensa, what?

We moved on next to the Pictionary. We split into two teams for this, and alternated the drawing of chits and the drawing of pictures. (notice: a pune, or a play on words.)
There were four ideas/ items on each card; all of them had one defining theme or connect. Here, the rules were to draw ONLY whatever was written on the card picked. Some amusement was caused when teams guessed the connect before all the items were drawn, and then spent time yelling random things at the person drawing. Poor Ali; poor beaver.
(Note--> Kiran was the one who said "beaver". The answer was "badger".)


After the Pictionary, we played Band Bluff, a game I invented purely for the purpose of the MHK. This was played as an individual game, with everyone just siting around and volunteering to pick a chit. The chits had names of bands (well known and otherwise) and the object of the game was to create a band-name-origin story for that band so that others could figure out who it was. My personal favourite (though nobody guessed the band) was the story for Chumbawumba that Ujjwal proposed. Honourable mentions for memorableness: Blind Faith, ABBA, Foreigner, Counting Crows, Talking Heads, AC/DC.
Near the end of this game, four Mensans decided they had to tear themselves away and move on either to work (Ujjwal and Sharmila) or to other venues (Varun and Guru).

We moved on then to the final prepared game for the evening, the Quotable Quotes. Here, the object of the game was to perform the quote from the famous movie that was given to you, and then have someone answer by quoting another line from the same movie. Since most people appeared to have missed seeing the movies, we modified the game to merely guessing which movie the quote was from. Slight diversion was caused when the movie was the Godfather, because, naturally, everyone wanted to show off a Brando imitation.

When we came to the end of the games, it was only around six, so we spent forty minutes or so playing pictionary with English movies. In that short span of time, Annette wowed us with tigers, dragons, and assorted weapons; Poorna stunned us all by revealing that she could draw a lifelike bust of Shakespeare and that she was related to him; Ananth proudly claimed his utter ignorance of all but the titles of the movies "because he learnt them for DC"; and Ali persisted in seeing scenes from Brokeback mountain in anything that anyone drew.
Notable mention: Ravi, with Flubber. :)

Eventually, we decided to all head home. We wished Ali luck for his year-odd stint in Phillipines, Kiran generously footed the MHK tab, and two jigsaw puzzles were handed over.

In all, a memorable day. Thanks to all who attended for being such great sports. I had a wonderful time.
:)

Ooh. Forgot to mention that I also received, on that day, my prize for winning the Photography Contest yay.