Hyderabad-based software consultant Piyush Swain, who became only the second person to win Rs 50 lakh in the game show Kaun Banega Crorepati-2, wants to keep the suspense on whether he hit the jackpot of Rs 2 crore.
"I will have to keep up the suspense till Saturday. All I can say at this stage is that I am going very strong. I am very confident of reaching Rs 2 crore mark, because the way I was playing so far, I know how to tackle the next two questions," Piyush told rediff.com on Friday night, when the telecast of the day's episode of KBC-2 ended with him answering the 13th question.
"My biggest scare was in the mythology section which had actually gone off well. It was a big relief because there won't be any more questions on mythology. Most of my predecessors got stuck in this section. None of them had gone beyond the 11th question without using the lifeline. I used the first lifeline at the 13th question," he pointed out.
The 28-year-old Piyush answered the first 12 questions effortlessly, without batting an eyelid. He hardly had the occasion to rack his brains. Explaining his 'modus operandi', he said he used common sense and logic to deduce the answers. In fact, there were several questions for which he did not know the answers but using logic and elimination, he picked up the correct answers.
Right from the first question, he used this technique and seemed to perfect it by the time he reached the 12th question.
He waltzed through the first five questions to cross the first milestone of Rs 20,000.
He faltered for a moment on the sixth question, but only briefly before zeroing in on the next four answers using elimination. Having crossed the second milestone of 10 questions or Rs 6,40,000, he even caught the eye of Amitabh Bachchan as the Big B complimented him saying, "You have the capacity to go all the way."
The 11th question was a bit of a problem but after making quick calculations, Piyush was spot on and after getting the 12th question right, he became the fifth contestant in KBC-2 to reach Rs 25 lakh.
"Which one of these personalities was born in present-day Tamil Nadu?" was the question that foxed him for a moment. All the four options were Tamilians: J Jayalalithaa, A R Rahman, M G Ramachandran and Rajnikanth but Piyush was not sure who were actually born in Tamil Nadu. He used his first lifeline: the 50: 50 option to delete the two wrong answers. He chose ARR from the remaining options and thus become the second contestant to hit the Rs 50-lakh mark in KBC-2.
Before Amitabh Bachchan could shoot off the 13th question, the time was up and he became a roll-over contestant with the penultimate and final questions falling into the next episode to be telecast on Saturday.
Piyush, suppressing his excitement and maintaining his cool, was reluctant to reveal the two crore-rupee secret: "Wait till tomorrow to know the answer," was his teaser.
Hailing from an Oriya family, Piyush was born on March 23, 1977 at Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh). Son of an ex-Indian Air Force officer, Parsuram Swain, who is currently working with State Bank of India, Bhubaneshwar, Piyush spent his childhood at Kanpur and Guwahati (Assam).
Spending his teenage years at Balasore in his home state (Orissa), he studies BE in Mining Engineering at NIT, Rourkela during 1995-99.
After living in Bhubaneshwar (Orissa) and Bangalore (Karnataka), he did his MBA degree from IIM, Kozhikode (Kerala) during 2002-04. He was in London for sometime in 2004 and moved over to Hyderabad where is working as associate consultant with Infosys Technologies Limited since 2004.
He is married to Pratiya. His hobby is Internet surfing at home but Pratiya, an affable housewife, does not share his interests. She was with him when he went to Mumbai for the shoot of the KBC-II episodes in August.
"She too was excited over the way I made progress in the game and made big money," he said, recalling the excitement that they together shared when he participated in the game.
