India's largest annual crossword puzzle contest for schoolchildren, CCCC Cryptic Crossword Contest started this year's edition with Ranchi city round on Tuesday at Delhi Public School.
Organised by Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan and Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, the event, now in its fifth edition, has The Telegraph (Young Metro) as an associate in eastern India.
City rounds will be held in 38 other locations, including Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad and others, ending with Kota and Shimla on September 6. In Jharkhand, city rounds will be held in Bokaro on Wednesday and Jamshedpur on Friday.
Winners and runners-up of city rounds will go to Delhi for a three-day event comprising quarter-finals, semi-finals and final, said national coordinator Raj Narayan who was present at DPS.
In the Ranchi leg, 80 students of Classes IX to XII from 39 schools took part in the contest where they had to find 20 words Across and Down with the help of clues within an hour. While each school sent one two-member team, host DPS was allowed to field an extra team.
Sapphire International School team comprising Kaavya Kapoor and Debagni Bera; host DPS with Mrinalini and Anwesha Das; and Surendranath Centenary School comprising Abhiraj and Aditya Anshul emerged the sharpest three.
"We attempted all clues," Kaavya said when asked how she and Debagni topped. "Most of our attempts were correct," quipped teammate Debagni.
"CCCC Cryptic Crossword Contest reminds me of four Cs that it gives the participants," state school education and literacy secretary Aradhana Patnaik, who was present during the launch of the contest, said. "These are confidence, creativity, competitiveness and concentration."
"We are glad to have hosted the Ranchi city round for four years in a row," said DPS principal Ram Singh.
Though the popular word game existed in some form earlier, journalist Arthur Wynne is credited as the inventor of the modern crossword puzzle. British-born Wynne who migrated to the US and worked in Pittsburgh and New York City, published his first crossword puzzle, then called word-cross, in The New York World, on December 21, 1913.
The diamond format that Wynne created underwent changes and the cryptic crossword introduced about a decade later became popular all over the world.
