Ankush Bajaj

Ankush Bajaj
Noted subjects	Philosophy, Hinduism, The Catcher in the Rye, Plant biology
High school	Hinsdale Central
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Ankush Bajaj is a current sophomore high school player at Hinsdale Central High School in Hinsdale, Illinois, and is typically the 2nd or 3rd scorer on the A team. While he claims his deep spiritual connection to Hinduism is what enables him to first-line Hinduism questions, Ankush is actually 3/8 Sikh and eats beef regularly.

Middle School

Ankush's attempts to start a quiz bowl team at Butler did not produce results, though this time period was crucial in the blossoming of his love for Hinduism and science.

2012-2013

Ankush began the year as a student at IMSA, opting to skip freshman year as a 'shmen at the prestigious school. While he was there, he joined the quiz bowl team and went to several practices, though apparently most people were unaware of that fact. After less than a month, Ankush and his mom made the decision to withdraw from the Academy and attend the area school, Hinsdale Central, for undisclosed reasons. Since that time, two possible hypotheses have arisen, in an attempt to explain why. One states that Hinsdale Central's math department heavily recruited Ankush for its math team, while another proposes that he simply chose Hinsdale because of its better quiz bowl team. Whatever the reason, Ankush immediately joined Scholastic Bowl and made a very strong impression on everyone; freshmen, seniors, and coaches alike; through engaging in capital city contests with B.J. Ryan and lecturing the freshmen on the biology topics that they had yet to cover in class. When the season finally began, Ankush opened with a bang, getting somewhere between 5-8 tossups over the first two matches against Leyden's and Downers Grove South's Junior Varsity teams. He immediately created buzz among the sophomore JV captains, who considered him and Sunny Chen (who had 8 tossups that day) as the definite stars. Over the season, Ankush continued to experience success, enough so that he and Sunny Chen were moved up to Varsity for one meet, and they contributed in the wins against York and Willowbrook. As Hinsdale was rather inactive outside of the West Suburban Conference, the team only went to one tournament the whole year, Loyburn. At the tournament, the B team was composed of 7 freshmen, as the sophomore captains had mostly quit by then. During one very close match against Maine South B, Mr. McCloud told the team during a timeout to "go for the win" as opposed to balancing playing time, so it was arbitrarily decided that the winning formation, the "Big Three," would be Sunny, Ankush, and James Zhou. Going into the last question tied at 190, Sunny managed to get the last tossup, on painting, and the team ended up 30ing the bonus, probably its only 30 the entire tourney, and it ended up being Hinsdale Central B's only win in the morning. The team finished the day 4-7, though one loss against Stevenson B must have been lost. Ankush ended with 12.14 ppg that day, and it still makes the team wonder how he managed to convince everyone he was top 3 when he had the most negs and second lowest ppg that day. For the rest of the season, Sunny was the clear standout, while the sophomore captains gradually started to consider James as the secondary scorer over Ankush.

2013-2014

Ankush is undoubtedly one of the more committed members of the Hinsdale Central quiz bowl team, and after James did surprisingly well at Earlybird, his cockiness started to annoy and discourage Ankush. As a response to Sunny's ridicule and ranting, Ankush was reluctantly pushed into the spot of literature specialist, though he still frequently beats Sunny in biology and chemistry. In addition, he powers Mahabharatha 4 out of 5 times, and averages 27 ppb on Hinduism bonuses. Meanwhile, he has made significant progress in lit, as he actually read The Catcher in the Rye, and has read the summaries for about 7 other books. Ankush's development as a lit player really strengthened the team, and marked the beginning of Hinsdale Central's rise to semi-prominence.