In the aftermath of Test 2, all of BITS Goa seeks to drown its sorrow in Waves, our annual cultural festival. The LDC, however, gladly pursues its own (and mostly uncared for) agenda, with all efforts directed towards bringing to fruition our Cultural Lit events and (Hail!) Contention – BITS Goa’s Annual British Parliamentary Debate Tournament.
The Contention OrgComm’s first task involves inviting an experienced Adjudication Core to supervise the tournament; from making the motions of the debates to troubleshooting conflicts between debaters. After exhausting multiple lists of potential suitors for our tournament, Contention 2016’s Adj Core finally comprised of the stellar trio of Jaya Jain, Souradip Sen and Osho Chhel, all planet-sized gravitational distortions on India’s debating grid(and giant sweethearts too, in retrospect). A popular adjudication core, for all the right reasons I might add, takes care of half of your publicity and participation troubles and sets you off to a confident start. With this bit done, we rolled out the Reg. forms and began our negotiations with the fest committees for budget allocation and decent accommodation for the participants. In no time, Contention was upon us.
This year’s Contention saw 33 teams and 48 adjes make the tabs, with 7 swing adjes. After a preliminary round to calibrate judge scores (that forced debaters out of their beds) and 5 pre-break rounds, 4 teams made the Novice break, 12 teams and 22 adjes, the Main break. NLS went onto win the novice finals and PES Bangalore were the winners of Contention 2016. Vedika from SLCU made her mark as the Best Adjudicator of the tournament.
For the hosts, Contention is not just a debating tournament. It’s an organized effort to promote a much-needed culture of Inter-Varsity Debating, formal public speaking and discussion on issues and principles that influence our life experience as seen through various lenses: Social, political, economic and cultural. On a domestic as well as on an international level, to answer questions that concern our lives at the hearth as well as principles we accept as a generation. Anyone who has ever played participant or spectator to a debate has felt the mind physically conforming to arguments and rebuttals in order to try and see the bigger picture. Anyone who has given a speech has done it for the thrill of feeling yourself speed up and feel your feet leave the ground and tapping into a world with a different frequency, a world of thought. The 7 minutes that seem shackling are often the forces that drive you to improvise, and as the adage of “Practice makes a man perfect” holds true, over time, these 7 minutes also become a means to have more and more nuanced discussions. Contention captures this realization in every individual who’s got a fondness for debating: From the new and indispensable batch of LDC inductees who man the debate rooms as runners and swings, to the seniors in our DebSoc who pretend to have risen above such trivial matters yet cannot help but get lured into swinging and see it as ‘their calling’, the OrgComm that successfully keeps its shit together and pulls off this tournament successfully over the years, bearing the winds, breathalyzers, alcohol-seizures, FIRs, flight-cancellations, sleeping internal adjes, etcetera etcetera. Last but not the least, this also includes the participants who breathe life into this structure and transform it into a competitive debating tournament.
– Patil
The LDC 