The Seagram Royal Stag MegaMind - The Final!

"Hand of fate is moving and the finger points to you
He knocks you to your feet and so what are you gonna do
Your tongue has frozen now you've got something to say
The piper at the gates of dawn is calling you his way

Your time will come,
Your time will come"

  The Wicker Man
Iron Maiden  


The winner, Hariharan  Iyer, flanked by Harish Raman and Nandakumar Gurumurthi

When a demure Hariharan Iyer of Satyam Computers announced on stage, "I've always been number 2, this is the first time I'm being number 1," he had a whole audience swept off its feet. Like Derek O'Brien, the quizmaster for the evening, said, Hyderabad's gods of tech were the humblest humans he'd seen.

Hariharan Iyer's time has come, but the winner of the Seagram Royal Stag Megamind was only one thing that swept the milling crowd at the ITC Kakatiya Sheraton off its feet.

 
 Normally, something you'd be traveling to space in. The set for  MegaMind transported 6 persons to glory.

 Billed as the greatest and richest quiz ever of Hyderabad, the Seagram  Royal Stag MegaMind, organized by Hyderabad's premier portal (us,  smartass!), surpassed all the expectations that it had generated,  and simply blew the mind of everyone who was part of the bursting-at-the-seams  crowd at Hyder Mahal! With names like Seagram, Deccan Chronicle, Shock, Allen Solly, Indian Airlines, ITC Kakatiya Sheraton, Titan, Access2future, Idea Cellular and Chinese Pavilion behind it, could it have been anything different?

To start with, there was the fact that the finalists were the last six of just about every one of Hyderabad's 25,000-strong software professionals who'd participated in the first round on fullhyd.com. Which basically meant that these 6 guys - Hariharan Iyer of Satyam (who won in a nail-biting finish), Harish Raman of D E Shaw (the victim of that nail-biting finish who came second),

Much as our finalists  beg to differ, the star of the evening was someone else!
Nandakumar Gurumoorthy of Juno (the third), Sreenivas Majeti of Intergraph, Harsh Mittal of Motorola and Rayan Ivaturi of I-Labs - were among the best tech brains of town. And a battle between them would just have to be awesome.

Then, the stage that was erected was breathtakingly astounding. Resembling the interior of a spaceship, it made the crowd feel that they had stepped into the world of Star Wars. Absolutely fitting that it was the setting for the final of the greatest tech event ever in Hyderabad.

 
Derek kept  the finalists on tenterhooks with his novel rounds...

 Next was the crowd that had gathered. Never after it became the tech  capital of the country has there been such a huge get-together in  Hyderabad of tech professionals at one place. Oracle, Microsoft, Baan,  Satyam, Wipro, Infotech, Infosys, Wilco, Intelligroup