“A Dad’s Army” from “Hypatia” was our sixteenth grid for this season. You can also check out other puzzles from Hypatia here.

Stats: 68 solvers attempted this puzzle.  53 solvers completed the puzzle and bonus forms. 43 solvers got the full score.

Here is the Grid:
(Annotations will be visible on solving the puzzle or on clicking “Reveal Grid”. Logged in solvers can see their submissions as well)

Bonus Questions:

1. What two word phrase is formed from the first letters of the extra words in the Across clues
   
   Solution

   Ans: FURIOUS ARTISTS

2. The location clued by the two word phrase that can be spotted in the grid
   
   Solution

   Ans: MADRAS – A charade of MAD(Furious) + RAS (Artists) (Nina highlighted in the grid)
   

Here’s the list of Top Scorers (For the full list, please check the Leaderboard in the Hall of Fame)

Out of 68 solvers,  53 completed the puzzle and 43  got the full score. Each of the following scored 162 points (Grid Score – 158,  Bonus – 4).

Anirudh Sahni
Arvind Ramaswamy
Ashit Hegde
Bhalchandra Pasupathy
Calvin Christ
Debasmita Basu
Harish T.K.
Himanshu Rajurkar
Ian J VanderSchee
Jyothish Balakrishnan
Kabir Firaque
Koteswara Rao Kolluru
Krittibas Dasgupta
Lakshmi A J Vaidyanathan
Lakshmi Prakash
Madhup Tewari
Madhusudan H Rao
Max Jackson
Mohsin Ahmed
Mona Sogal
Mukundala Balasubramanyam
Narayan MV
Narayanan R
D Narayana Swamy
Nilesh Parmar
Paul Henderson
Prakash Arumugam
Ramachandra Nagendra Prasad
Ramesh Ss
Ramki Krishnan
Ratna Rao
Rengaswamy Narasimhan
Samit Kallianpur
Samraat Saxena
Sandhya Paruchuri
Shashwat Salgaocar
Sohil Bhagat
Sparsh Sinha
Srinivas Nivarty
Supriya Mithal
Veera Raghavan Sundararajan
Venkatesan P.
Venkatraghavan S

Congrats to the toppers and to all the solvers who participated.

Grid Rating: The puzzle got a fabulous rating of 9.1. It was rated a perfect 10 by 19 out of the 53 folks who voted (35%). The lowest rating was 6.

Favourite Clues:  The Top clues were

1. 1D Engineer asks rich wife for vintage vehicles (9) – 18 votes
2. 5D Young parliamentarian given rent by old woman (5) – 17 votes
3. 16D Painful, boring group rejected instructions (9) – 14 votes
4. 23A Sculptor present takes back headless figurine (9) – 11 votes
5. 2D Navaratri became crowded around New York neighbourhood (7) -8 votes

This was a late tribute for Madras Day that is usually celebrated on 22nd August. It’s the city where I was born and always close to my heart. Thanks for the feedback and good to know that many of you enjoyed the puzzle and the end game.

PS: The solvers comments are in the comments thread in the post.