Literary, Debate and Quiz Club: The Year That Was

The Literary, Debate and Quiz Club of MIT, Manipal houses some of the most insane folks in and around campus. Quick, quirky, witty and quintessentially smart, these people can easily claim to be some of the best debaters, quizzers, and literary enthusiasts we have seen in a long time. In the last one year, they’ve brought laurels to the college wherever they’ve gone, from BITS GOA to the NITTE fest. Seeing the charm, surreal winning streak that has refused to leave them (for good reason!) and mostly impressed by these folks who know their way around every situation, MTTN decided to talk to them about how the year was and what they’ve achieved so far.

MTTN: How do you hold your club sessions? What do you guys do to be the best at everything?

LnD: Ever since last semester, we have established a proper Debating Society called the DebSoc. The members of DebSoc meet on Sundays for three hours where we have a full-fledged British Parliamentary Debate session. We have three strata of debaters- beginners, average debaters and the season debaters who’ve won numerous competitions. We keep rotating members among the three groups and this helps in the overall growth and learning of each and every student.

A debate generally has one adjudicator who moderates and the other debaters who are given a preparation time of 15 minutes after which they begin. The idea behind DebSoc is to reach a level of perfection such that we are able to see ourselves win at the World University Debating Championship.

We have undergone rigorous training, participated in National Level fests and winning these have given us a great boost as well as helped us learn and grow immensely.

In IIM Bangalore Unmaad 2016, LnD won the runners up award for debate, second runners up for J.A.M, winner award in Miss Unmaad, Hence Proved, and both winners and runners up for Scenes from a Hat(Extempore), and Spotlight.

MTTN: How do you go about the quizzing sessions? From what we have seen, LnD has a quizzing event as well as a separate set of events during Revels and these are some of the toughest quizzes we have witnessed.

LnD: All our members help pool in questions which they frame themselves, and we meet every week for a couple of hours and discuss these questions. We have a very active quiz group, with ardent quizzers. In fact most these quizzes are not trivia based. The answer is somewhere in the question and you just have to be smart enough to extract it.

LnD’s flagship quizzing event is Quizzathon which we conducted earlier this semester and the Harry Potter Quiz saw a huge turnout. Even the General Quiz, India Quiz and M.E.L.A Quiz was a big success.

In BITS GOA Waves 2016 and the NITTE fest 2016, LnD won the first place in the Vices Quiz, Entertainment Quiz and Word Games. In IIM B’s UNMAAD they were finalists in the SPENT Quiz, and in Beg, Borrow, and Steal.

MTTN: Tell us something about the “literary” side of Literary and Debating Club.

LnD: We have some great plans to develop the literary aspects of our members as well. Of late we are introducing a new section called Slam Poetry in our sessions where we plan to experiment with poets. They have to come up with short poems and not just write it but also recite it, and this is the best way to develop both your writing skills as well as oration. This has never been tried and tested in Manipal before and we have already introduced #slampoetsociety where we encourage people to share a slam poetry video every week and want them to know how it is done hence starting a culture.

We also have our annual creative writing and Potpourri events, and another new thing we are planning to start is the RPG style of writing. We want to encourage TTT (terribly tiny tales) , and through our LnD Facebook page we create a medium for the readers to remain interested. In fact very soon we plan to have a joint venture with MIT’s media bodies so that all the writers can come forth and have a productive brain storming session.

MTTN: Tell us about the Charades sessions.

LnD: We have intense Charades sessions as well, and there are various groups actively involved, with one of them calling themselves Clock Blockers too! We have won the NITTE Charades event, and overall champions in Revels Potpourri too, where the second and third rounds involved charades. Also we have frequent J.A.Ms which is the most difficult event of all as it needs the participants to be quirky, have presence of mind, be grammatically correct and keep track of what the other person is saying.

In the NITTE fest, 2016 as well as in the NIT-K fest they’ve won the first place in J.A.M. They also won the first place in Charades in the NITTE fest.

MTTN: So what are your plans with Bazinga?

LnD: Bazinga is our flagship yearly event. It is the main event by LnD and this year we have seven sub categories in this event- Football quiz; Science, tech and business quiz; J.A.M; Creative Writing, Potpourri, Slam-Poetry and Story building. We have introduced two new literary events this time.  It is an intra-MU literature fest and we expect participation from KMC, WGSHA, SOC and so on. We plan to build a literary network through all these colleges. The event is spread from 1^st to 4^th April and there are many cash prizes to be won.

We were pretty amazed and awestruck at their phenomenal progress too. As one of the oldest clubs of MIT, this club has grown exponentially in the last couple of years. They have established a systematic network of debating and quizzing and with the four day intense debate session during Revels, 2016 they have mostly proved the point that they are going places, and no one can stop them.

To check out “The Year that was” for other clubs/teams/organizations, stay tuned.

As said to Prattusha Mukhopadhyay for MTTN.