Acumen 2002: (From left) Losing finalists Avishek Mukherjee and Sambit Bannerjee from the ICFAIAN Business School

Acumen champs: (From left) Debate champs Rohit Sehgal and Avik Bhattacharya of Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta with quiz winners Navin Ahmed and Ganesh Rana of XLRI

Guess which product was once sold as a brain tonic? Coca-Cola, believe it or not. And it's not news to B-school students, for whom it would be among the sure-shot quiz scorers. From Coke to Carly Fiorina, bureaucrats to managers, the East Zone round of the BT-Standard Chartered Acumen 2002 quiz and debate contest covers it all, with the region's top B-school students caught in an intense battle of wits, strategy and reflex.

Their immediate goal? To win a place at the Acumen 2002 finals in November, and the sprawling Joka campus of IIM-Calcutta (IIM-C) is swarming with people curious to find out who steals the top honours from the East.

This round of Acumen 2002 kicks off with the prelims for the debate. The topics range from 'Marketing, in the Indian context, is a cost centre' to 'Compensation is the only motivator'. After three verbal wit-slanging sessions, the match gets narrowed to IIM-C against ICFAI.

The quiz show, with Joy Bhattacharya of ESPN as the quizmaster, rouses even more interest from the audience-with everyone armed to the teeth with their own stock of trivia. The audience goes wild at the announcement of the bonus prizes for the crowd-Ray-Bans, T-shirts and caps. Even the pull of the India-England ICC Trophy match cannot keep the audience away from the excitement. Sample question: which company started as a punchcard maker for Tisco? The answer: TCS, Acumen's associate sponsor.

At the end, the quiz victor's spotlight shines on Navin Ahmed and Ganesh Rana, the two-member team from Xavier Labour Research Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur-which pips IIM-C for the honour.

If there are any long faces amongst the home crowd, they disappear with the East Zone round's final debate, which has IIM-C outscore the rest of the B-school hopefuls to earn a seat at the national finals in Delhi. What have IIM-C's Avik Bhattacharya and Rohil Sehgal done to win? They've convinced the jury that the Indian government needs bureaucrats and not managers.

At the end, XLRI and IIM-C it is, the two East Zone teams on their way to match wits with the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon and Delhi University's Faculty of Management Studies from the North, and with SP Jain Institute for Management Research and Symbiosis College for HRD from the West. Yes, IIM-Ahmedabad lost out marginally, and couldn't quite qualify.

That leaves the South Zone qualifying round, coming up soon. Will another IIM make it to the national finals? Stay tuned.