Final Dates - Confirm ASAP

[Sounak Sarkar]

Okay guys.

Can we confirm 11th November to 13th November as final confirmed dates for BSD? 

Any time earlier is too short a while. Later is SF, leaving aside last week of project submission of course.

--
Sounak Sarkar
IV Year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.)
National Law School of India University
Bangalore

[Radhika Chitkara]

Seems good. Will have to check with the schools of course?

--

Radhika Chitkara

IV Year, B.A., LL.B.(Hons.)

NLSIU, Bangalore

[Radhika Chitkara]

And why didn't you write the paper?

[Vipul Nanda]

He was unwell. 

--
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt.

[priyanka.hu...@gmail.com]

Fine with me

Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone

---

From: Vipul Nanda <lucifer...@gmail.com>

Sender: nls...@googlegroups.com

Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:16:49 +0530

To: <nls...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: nls...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: Final Dates - Confirm ASAP

[siddhartha basu]

Sounds ok. Just gimme a day or two to talk to the sponsors. IMS and a
few others hopefully. Let's see if they are ok with it. But shouldn't
be a problem from what i think.

On 9/30/11, priyanka.hu...@gmail.com

<priyanka.hu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Fine with me
> Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone
>

--
______________________________________________________________________________
Siddhartha Basu
NLSIU,Bangalore.

[Spadika Jayaraj]

Who are the other sponsors?

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Date sounds good.

I'm going to meet Sounak's Oracle Foundation contact and these people from Teach For India. Basu has a few others up his sleeve.

[Vinodini Srinivasan]

I just checked out a few school calendars. it seems fine. Class 8 students have their NTSE exams on the 13th but that's a minor glitch that we can ignore

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Everyone writes it.. Should we wait?

[Bhargavi Raman]

Not everyone's a nerd.

--
Bhargavi Raman
IV Year, B.A. LL.B. (Hons.)

National Law School of India University
Bangalore

Mobile: 9986697310

[siddhartha basu]

There is IMS. Then there are these Microfinance companies like SKS etc. I am trying to get Cadbury's also. If nothing else they can always give us chocolates instead. :) 

And NTSE is important. Atleast in my school everyone wrote it.

[Spadika Jayaraj]

Lol yeah, the NTSE and debate people are hardly likely to overlap. Besides, won't a majority of the participants be from class 11 and 12?

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

No, they're mostly younger. The ones who are yet to worry about board exams.

And btw, i take offence to that :P

[Sounak Sarkar]

NTSE can suck it

--
Sounak Sarkar
IV Year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.)

[Sounak Sarkar]

I hope we actually get more people from the 8th to 10th bracket. they'll be doing this for longer. they can also act as liaison for us in the future.

[Sounak Sarkar]

So everyone's home and bed early? What is this dyood?

[Viraj Parikh]

its called a life, try it out

--
Viraj Parikh

+919620798608

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

I think we can manage 8 to 10. We did the debate last year around the same time. Need to raise money, conduct selections, prepare material, prepare another workshop and have practice sessions on 6 and 7. Volunteers?

[Spadika Jayaraj]

Available for any bitch-work. :P

Btw, need the localites help out in any way during holidays?

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

7th is a holiday for Bakrid. Do you want to try 5, 6, 7?

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

I have an idea. We can coopt the selection process -

We can ask each school to send a maximum of ten students. For these, we'll hold the workshops in two parallel sessions. After that, we'll split them into team with a senior on each team and have practice. One school will be judged by the same panel and we can use those scores for the purpose of selection.

[Sounak Sarkar]

when i said 8th to 10th, i meant grades.

anyways, reason for 11th to 13th was us getting rooms free and students free. it's a sunday on 13th. 11th can be workshop, 12th can be the first two rounds.

but then, i dunno how receptive they'd be to a weekend, in which case, we'll have to shift to weekdays.

selections, is it possible to assign two or three students in each school to oversee selections? or conduct it itself? in phases. 
we can select a main team and an observer team, and ask students to come and cheer or something :P

[Sounak Sarkar]

viraj, life begins at 10am.

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

I know you meant grades. That's why i think we should have it earlier. If 7th, the monday is a holiday. We can do with having two classrooms on 4th, having practice after 1 30 on 5th and empty rooms on 6th and 7th.

[Sounak Sarkar]

hmm. but didn't we choose to avoid those dates because they were too early? in any case, the previous set of dates was the weekend you're talking about. the reason we chose to push it by a week was for the workshops and follow up sessions to happen.

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

I think we can manage it. We shouldnt overlap with NTSE under any circumstances. The other things can also be arranged. We have to talk to the points of contact over the holidays.

[Sounak Sarkar]

will it really be that big an issue? shite.

then we better start working fast. 5th 6th and 7th is perfect in that case.

[Sounak Sarkar]

okay. guys. we need volunteers to make write ups about every workshop. photos and all are uploaded on picasa. leave the editing work for now. 

any volunteers? needless to say, you had to BE there during the workshop.

we of course need one more person to write something introducing the concept briefly but interestingly. 

this is all for the blog. we'll publicize the blog in say four days?

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

And madan, can you get onto the school contacts for testimonials?

[priyanka.hu...@gmail.com]

Yes I'm already on it

Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone

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From: Badrinarayanan Seetharaman <badrinara...@gmail.com>

Sender: nls...@googlegroups.com

Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 13:13:19 +0530

To: <nls...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: nls...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: Final Dates - Confirm ASAP

[Sounak Sarkar]

awesome.

write ups anyone?

[Anil Sebastian]

I'll write for the DPS North workshop?

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Nice. Focus on the perspective of someone organizing it.

[Vipul Nanda]

Got Vidyamandir School. Workshop likely to be Oct 22nd. They're academically good, non-posh, Preethi's mom is a teacher there.

--
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt.

[Vipul Nanda]

Got Vidyamandir School. Workshop likely to be Oct 22nd. They're academically good, non-posh, Preethi's mom is a teacher there.

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

do we have space for it? and who are they? never heard of them.

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Didn't we decide to stop at 16 for now?

[Sounak Sarkar]

umm...we had.

no more please. we have enough

[Priyanka Madan]

ok, someone please forward the document that has the contacts of the school kids for the testimonials asap.
sounak, you bong, respond to mails.

thanks

[sidharth chauhan]

I am not sure if scheduling it for Nov. 4-6 or even Nov. 11-13 is such a great idea. Will there be enough time to conduct the rest of the workshops and follow-up sessions (which might entail sending people to judge selections in each school) within the first four weeks of the next trimester? Is there a case for running the schools' tournament sometime in December, i.e. before the schools break for christmas? That should give us enough time to do more workshops and preparatory sessions. Running the tournament too early will be like preparing a half-cooked dish.

If some sponsorship comes through, it might still make sense to perhaps run a small BP tournament in early november. Indian teams (NLS included) badly need some practice in that format and running a BP tournament requires fewer rooms and much lesser manpower. If costs related to accommodation can be accounted for, then it should be really easy to publicise the tournament. Even a small tournament with let's say 24-32 teams will be worth the effort. It also gives our internal pool of judges (at least the ones who take the activity seriously) an opportunity to get practice. In the worst case, we can do a 16 team round-robin tournament (with no tabbing required) and I think that teams planning to attend Asians BP will most certainly show up.

On another note, I judged in the regional rounds of 'Debating Matters India' on Thursday and there's a fair bit of interest in learning about competitive debating. In fact the organisers are not happy with the existing method of online eliminations and want some local help with organising a more effective selection process in the future. I think NLS is best placed to address this need and it ties in nicely with the Bangalore Schools' Debate program (assuming that it will grow next year).

We should also apply to the International Debate Education Association (IDEA) for a grant to support our outreach programs. They've supported debate programs which emphasize the educative aspects of the activity as well as its role in social advocacy. With the NLS Union Debates and the Bangalore School's Debate program, there's a good chance of securing this grant. More on this in a few days.

Lastly, I am supposed to do a workshop and judge selections at JGLS this coming tuesday and wednesday. I have also gotten invitations to run tournaments at Loyola (Chennai) in mid-January and Miranda House (DU) in late-Feb.

regards,
Sidharth Chauhan

[Vipul Nanda]

Sidharth, a couple of quick things - 

Let's work out the IDEA proposal and fix a tentative deadline of sending it by the 20th, 5 days after meeting on campus to figure it out? I'm only worried that the strings attached might need to be looked at properly once - I remember hearing that once IDEA gets in, it just never really gets out, and that it's run by old white people who can be quite bothersome and stifling.

That said, money's money.

On that note, one last thing - can you please check up on this rumour coming out of Loyola that they have some gigantic amount of prize money?

V.

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Few things.

On the model -

What we can think of doing is to make the tournament itself a four day event. At the first stage, we ask the schools to nominate twelve students each, with a healthy mixture of students from different classes. On the first day, we can hold intensive training sessions. I'm thinking we should split them into three groups of around sixty students. We can run three modules simultaneously in three classrooms after 1:30. I'm thinking we should necessarily cover argumentation, rhetoric and logical fallacies. This would mean, the appointed teachers would do the same session thrice with three different groups, each lasting 45 mins to an hour, with appropriate breaks and exercises in between. Sounak is going to debate teaching material to come up with a more appropriate pedagogy.

On the second day, we conduct the selections. The format would be identical to the selections for inter class, except in different groups one to two schools large. We begin the debate on the third day. Conduct three rounds, have a bonfire type thing and shut for the night. The fourth day, we hold one round, release results at lunch and then have the semis and finals. This can be followed by a union debate and then the closing ceremony. As for the motion, i'm thinking we should run a conventional motion nicely. For example, censorship preceded by say, a Lelyveld book reading. It helps us increase our access.

That night, post closing ceremony, we hold a meeting with the teacher representatives from each school and explain the grand plan of appointing a mentor to each school, conducting regular workshops, creating self-sustained debating communities and train them for ASDC (If this goes well, we can write to replace the Madrasi farce in a few years from now).

Why twelve - Because it's an ideal number of students we need to keep interested for debating to catch on in schools.

On Half Baking -

I think we should have speeches that are 5 minutes long and of four rounds, release themes for all and the motions for one/two. This is manageable and when we ran this for the internal debate league, there were at least some harried attempts to read up and stay prepared. Obviously with conscientious school children, we can justifiably expect considerably more diligence. Many will be able to manage this much at this stage.

On the timing -

It's imperative that we conduct the tournament at the earliest. As it stands the remaining schools have all been scheduled for the first two weeks immediately following our return to college. We should be done with the workshops by the end of October along with the demos. With the end of moot rounds, we have more volunteers for this purpose.

November is immediately after their Dasara break and before any major unit tests. I checked my brother's calendars from the last few years. This is the time period when the quizzing season in schools really begin to heat up. The same applies to other competitions. As you noticed, Debating Matters too was conducted right now. Before the Christmas break from the middle to end of December, most schools conduct unit tests or preparatory examinations. January onwards is packed with sports festivals etc.

For us, our trimester ends in the middle of January, after which we're missing for a considerable period of time. Unless we begin now and ensure that at least three sessions, including an introductory one is conducted before the end of this trimester, we're likely to lose all the momentum we've generated so far.

As an aside, i was wondering about some people staying back over the holidays to continue the workshops. It begs the question of a sustainable model - i'm thinking about what and how we can charge each school etc. On a grander scale, im thinking of looking for an endowment for a debate and public engagement chair to pay for intl debate participation and union debates. I was exploring a few options. Sounak suggested infosys/kris gopalakrishnan, especially because of their association with the construction of our library and their general leanings..

On the BP Culture -

I concur entirely with the need for generating and sustaining interest in what is undoubtedly the most challenging format of debating (despite my own personal failures). To this end, i think we should hold an internal debate league with a 32 team cap, through which we can create a pool of debaters and judges. Hosting a tournament would automatically bar us from actually getting practice.

I believe the success of the NLS Debate was in no small way directly associated with the fortunes of our debaters. NLSD was and is revered for its adjudication pool and the fact that there can be no college that can pull of a tournament with as much panache or class. To run a successful BP tournament, we must necessarily ensure that our BP performances take an upward turn.

Before RVDT, some of those guys had suggested setting aside some money from our sponsorship efforts so we could jointly fly someone down to coach us for a week or so. They also suggested charging some registration to try and make up some of the costs. By putting them up in the Training Centre, we could save up quite a bit. If i'm not mistaken, LND requisitioned some amount to conduct workshops of some kind this year. We must utilise that well.

Moreover, on a slightly less important note, if we are to host a tournament in November, we shouldve begun rego by now and finished a few rounds of publicity, and gathered some amount of money to work with. We're way behind schedule and i don't know we should start off in an unprofessional/disorganized fashion without getting those previous things ready.

On Soros Foundation/IDEA -

We've been compiling data on ex debaters, trying to figure more possibilities of linkages with other organizations etc. Let's see where this takes us. It'll do us a lot of good.

I wish i could be more apologetic about this rant. Sorry!

--
Badri

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Not to mention, LnD's going to be cramped to hell with legala money to raise, content to be set and to organize bsd and another union. I dunno if there are likely to be enough resources dedicated to the BP.

Madan, mailed them?

[priyanka.hu...@gmail.com]

Mailed whatever personal contacts I could gather. Ask sounak to mail the contacts to me! I've asked him forever to mail me the list. Says it'll take a while

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---

From: Badrinarayanan Seetharaman <badrinara...@gmail.com>

Sender: nls...@googlegroups.com

Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 23:58:15 +0530

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

His comp crashed.

Chauhan, can you get us the debating matters contact? I think british council might be interested in the Union in some capacity.

[Sounak Sarkar]

Priyanka. Really sorry for the delay. Shall try. Pujo's on here, so everything's shut. I need my computer fixed. Till then, i'll gather the rest and send them to you.

[Sounak Sarkar]

Vipul. Soros and all is good. Have you finished the proposal?

[Vipul Nanda]

Badri - Mate, we only started doing well once NLS D took off - it's because debaters being made to adjudicate and learning from the best and learning from sitting on the other side of the table is the best practice you can have - its better than actual tournament practice for 2 reasons. First, there's no other real way to incentivize debaters to adjudicate well and learn from the shift in perspective; and second, tournament settings as practice are awesome, but only work when teams are absolutely open to feedback and understanding what went wrong.

It's an unfortunate corollary of NLS' success on the debate circuit, but we're less amenable than we used to be to figuring out how to debate to suit the judges and making sure we're more open to different debating styles and the like. People feel entitled to a win, feel entitled to be argued with as to why they've lost - to have it proved to them, and what not. My ranting on this aside, I think the BP tournament allows for good exposure and practice, and sets the tone for the many adjudicators who will also come here for practice, and when they go to ABP they'll carry with them the idea that people from NLS know what they're talking about. 

First, as for the workshop - Harish Natarajan is going to be in town from mid November to early December, or some such. We can hold the workshop then, and ask him to come DCA the BP tournament - those aren't mutually exclusive from each other. Basically, we can manage both - but all of this, this entire discussion is premature.

As I see it, let's make sure the money comes through (Go Basu! <waves pom poms>) and then we can start a PR Blitz (sorry, Sounak - I've been busy making posters for it, and haven't looked at the proposal yet. But you'll be happy to know I've downloaded 96 new fonts and GIMP, and I'm going to have a working station for all my designing efforts before too long) and see if we get a good response. If registration doesn't really work out, that's okay. I have been soft-selling the concept to a lot of teams, and I'm sure RV, IIT, Nalsar, Christ, DU, and FOLC (if we're REALLY nice) will actually turn up - so maybe a smaller tournament, sure. But still a notable one. And these things need momentum - at some point, the basic cycle needs to change and we need loads of shit happening in one year to set the tone for the next decade.

[Badrinarayanan Seetharaman]

Think about one thing. Did PEC gain credibility just because they ran a successful tournament? Quality of the tournament comes after credibility, not before it.

I think we need internal interest before we can kick it off. Right now, we have barely a handful of judges. All those benefits work just as well or much much better when an internal debate league is run well. The feedback we received last time around for the one we organzed in the second trimester was extremely encouraging. It will be more beneficial to NLSIU as a whole.

Even exposure, practice, sensitivity and a sense of challenge will work better internally simply because it's a new format for most of us. We can learn together. External adjudicators wouldn't carry anything with them if our tournament is not of high quality. Unfortunately, we don't have the expertise for it.

And nanda, that entitlement thing is some shit. There's no doubt we aren't the same as some who graduated before us. We are definitely not as good, but we don't walk around with the chips on our shoulder. At least even if we do, we are more than fair to judges and other teams.

Loads of shit in one year will just hamper our progress and waste time better spent on doing other things simply because we wouldn't be able to do it well enough. Why don't you want to equip ourselves before hosting a tournament? We aren't even covering most of the BP practice. This gap is the best time to get an internal bp culture going. Doing things in the last minute wouldn't help. Have you drawn up budgets, made a proposal, sent out invites? Why can't we just use Harish well and get him down for an NLS internal tourney/workshop? It'll do a lot more good for BP in law school and the rest of the country when we do hold it next year.

I know LnD's looking for an image revamp. Just think about whether this is the best way to go about it. (What happened to the writers workshop? A successful lit week? The fact that nobody in law school might be competent to make an open quiz for legala if we don't start now?)

[Sounak Sarkar]

Vipul. Congratulations on the font.

But why are you not finishing the proposal? Are you paying for the events this year?

Why are you making posters for anything besides BSD? Who's working on BSD? Do you think we have time?

[siddhartha basu]

Firstly, let's not confuse the intent behind trying to organise the BP. LnD will get more than enough opportunities for revamping its image. From LeGala to the internal tourney there will be ample scope for doing the same. Also, here i don't necessarily agree with you when you say people might not be that competent. I mean obviously we won't be as good as shady, but common Pranav/you/vikram etc. can do a decent job i am sure. 

For me the BP-tournament essentially signifies start of something new. A format which we have ignored far too long. I am not pushing for it just for the sake of it. It really doesn't make sense to have one poorly organised event just to add to the tally of what LnD did this academic year.I am all for the workshop idea. The only thing is, let's see if its possible to hold a decent BP tournament. And if it is obvious that we can't I atleast won't be the one still rallying behind it. Also, if nothing else the tournament can provide the much needed spark to push forward the BP culture in India. The thing with the workshop is it does not much to organise it. So let's just make sure  that the BP not a viable option before discarding it. 

And it is also true that we have an insane number of events planned for this tri-mester. We don't need the BP just because it'll look good for the committee. Atleast i look at it cos i think it'll make a difference.   

[His Greatness Manish]

As of now we only have 14 confirmed, on the Google Doc at least.

~~~~
Manish.

[Sounak Sarkar]

Ah. Leave that to us.

[Sounak Sarkar]

I'm assuming of course, that Bishops has confirmed. Any news on that front? We need 3 hours. It's still tentative?