Parnab Mukherjee conducts the Spell Bee on Wednesday. Telegraph picture

Quizmaster Parnab Mukherjee with the participants at Confluence on Tuesday. (Kundan Yolmo)

Siliguri, Sept. 7: The off-the-beat spelling competition on the second day of Confluence, the three-day event organised by St Michael’s School in association with The Telegraph, caught the attention of hill and plains students alike while they tried to spot the missing “j” and “c”— or insert them — in similar sounding words.

Unlike the traditional competitions, Parnab Mukherjee, who co-ordinated Spelling Bee, gave an interesting dimension to the event in which 10 schools participated. But it started with the usual format where students were asked to spell “floccinaucinihilipilification,” the second longest word in English language according to the Oxford Dictionary. This was followed by spellings of similar sounds, and then words ending with “phobia” and “logy”.

What gave the competition the edge was finding out the “missing letters that kept couples apart”. For example, the participants were asked to spell cricket commentator “Navjot Singh Sidhu” and his wife, “Navjyot”.

Some were asked to spell author “Dominique Lapierre” (of City of Joy fame) and his wife, “Dominique Lapierre”. “The difference lay in the phonetics,” said Parnab. “Since he is French, the ‘que’ will become ‘c’,” said Parnab. “So, phonetically, the spelling will be Dominic.”

“Our attempt was to deviate from the usual format of Spell Bee and make it interesting,” said Parnab said after the event.

In the final round, the students were asked to differentiate between Indian origin words pronounced by the English and the Americans and that uttered by the Indians. These included “Puducherry” and “Pondicherry,” “Assam” and “Ahom”.

St Xavier’s School emerged the winner, while Loreto Convent Darjeeling held the second position. The third position was shared by St Michael’s School, the host institution, and GD Goenka School.

The inter-school quiz competition held at the same venue on the first day of Confluence was equally interesting.

About 17 schools participated in the event that had questions ranging from subjects like Bangladesh cricket to Pakistani cuisine and Indian roads.

“It was entirely a paper-less quiz, I had just asked from memory. Our intention was to know how much the students have learnt academically and simultaneously, how well they are aware of their surroundings,” said Parnab who had conducted the quiz.

A team that had asked to be quizzed on Siliguri could not say whose statue stood opposite Tenzing Norgay’s statue at Darjeeling More.

“The answer is veteran communist leader Ratanlal Brahmin. We wanted to know how aware the students are about their surroundings,” Parnab said.

St Joseph’s School (North Point) Darjeeling emerged the winners in the quiz, followed by St Michael’s School Siliguri as the first runner-up and St Xavier’s School Siliguri as second runner-up.

Parnab said tomorrow’s debate would be “no less interesting”. “It will be a turn-court debate, that is, every team will have to speak both in favour and against the topic,” he said. “Points would be given on the entire exercise and not on speaking in favour of a topic,” he added.

Robin Chakraborty, the vice-principal of St Michael’s School, said the response to Confluence has been increasing over the years.

“This is the fourth consecutive year that we are organising the event. Back in 2008, we had only hosted a quiz. In 2009, we included debate along with a quiz for Confluence. This is the fourth year and this time, Spell Bee had been added,” he said.

“It is nice to see that the number of schools participating at the event is growing every year. Our objective behind organising Confluence is to provide a good platform to students to prove their talents.”