The Habitat Young Visionary Award has come to Saarang now.

One of the most prestigious youth awards in the country, HYVA entails writing and arguing out your vision about the nation. If you are the next visionary a fully paid summer school to Cambridge awaits you.

Topic: The Change I want to See; The Change I want to Make

Deadline for essay entry: December 15, 2009


Are you the next visionary?


The list of semifinalists for HYVA 2010 can be found here.

The semifinals for the south-zone will be on 20th January in IIT Madras.



UPDATES

Debate

Arguments can take many flavours, and can get pretty nasty at times, but hey, we like to argue. So here is today’s  motion : This House must argue.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we the speaking events co-ordinators of Saarang, Ladies and Gentlemen, interpret the given motion “This House must argue”, as follows Ladies and Gentlemen -:

We define the house as all those seated at the Debating hall at Saarang 2010, Ladies and Gentlemen. We interpret argue, as argument by the rules of American Parliamentary Debate, as outlined by the esteemed and crazy co-ordinators.

We interpret awesome argument as brilliant content with brilliant speaking Ladies and Gentlemen. And we would like to establish Ladies and Gentlemen, that saying “Ladies and Gentlemen”, is not quite necessary. What I mean Ladies and Gentlemen, is that there’s always “Sir” and “The Mighty Opposition” and “The Retarded Government” and “The Deluded Opposition” and so on... Mix it up, for god’s sake, Ladies and Gentlemen!!

So Ladies and Gentlemen, blow us away with your passion, inspire us with your conviction, have us rolling in the aisles, and make the hair on our hairy necks stand.

Hmmm... So what the hell is parliamentary debate? Here's an outline of the rules -:

 

Pre-Registration

There are two ways to enter the Saarang National Debate

  1. Pre-Registration : Teams can mail in a form with the names of the two team members, their email ids, the college they are from and the credentials of the team (parliamentary debates you have participated in/won). Mail us at the email id mentioned below, BEFORE 5th JANUARY.
  2. On the Spot Registration : Teams can enter through a written prelims at Saarang after registering on the spot. Pre-registered teams need not write the prelims.

Pre-registered teams will receive confirmation of their registration by email. A list of pre-registered teams will also be put up on the site.

Round 1

We have a round of simple debate, where each team debates on a given topic. This round serves as an elimination round to choose the final 8 teams. Details will be given on the spot.

Round 2

The 8 teams shall then be divided into 4 groups of 2 teams each.

Each of these groups shall then participate in a round of Debate, primarily modelled on what is known as the American Parliamentary Debate format, with each of the members of the two teams presenting their arguments one after the other.
After these four presentations, the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister shall make one final, short presentation each, in which they shall offer a rebuttal of their respective adversary’s arguments. Note, during this final presentation, no new arguments are to be introduced.

In short, this is how a round will look like (‘Government’ here refers to the team speaking for the motion and ‘Opposition’ refers to the one speaking against it):

•    Prime Minister (1st Speaker of the Government Team)
•    Leader of the Opposition (1st Speaker of the Opposition Team)
•    Member of the Government (2nd Speaker of the Government Team)
•    Member of the Opposition (2nd Speaker of the Opposition Team)
•    Leader of the Opposition (Opposition Rebuttal)
•    Prime Minister (Government Rebuttal)

4 Teams shall be selected from these 4 groups.

Round 3

The 4 teams shall be grouped into 2 groups of 2 teams each. Each group participate in a round of debate exactly as described above, and a final 2 teams shall be selected.

Round 4

These final 2 teams shall then engage in a final round, from which one will emerge champion.

List of teams seeded through to the speaking round:

1. Sayan Das & Apoorv Tripathi
2. Nayantara Anandani Pande & Kavitha Ananth
3. Aditya Choudary & Ambar Bhushan
4. Tanvee Nandan & Pratichi Mishra
5. P.N.S.V.K. Sagar & A. Srinath
6. Phani & Abhishek
7. Bhargavi & Anusha Putti
8. Ramki & Srivas
9. Mohita Gupta & Mirza Mohanmmed Ali Khan
10. Atish Mathur & Avinash Wadhwani
11. Karthik Sivaram & Prasun Kumar
12. Varun Rajiv & Eashan Ghosh
13. Asit Behera & Ritu Nachani
14. Priyanka Bagmar & Shruthi S
15. Praveena Pechetti & Iti Johri
16. Tarun Gopalakrishnan & Varun Vaish
17. Arani Chakrabarty & Rakshit Sharma
18. S. Sowmiya & G. Srinivas
19. Nihari Bhupati Raju & Abhigna A.S.
20. Siddharth Mahesh & Khalid Ahmed
21. Meghna Das & Neha Mujumdar
22. Gayathri Iyer & Nikita Wadhwa

If your team is on this list, please contact the co-ordinators immediately! All seeded teams have been sent a mail, confirming that they are through to round two. All the teams that did not make it to the list, don't be disheartened, participate in the written prelims and get a wild card entry!

Contact Info:

Sundar Aditya             (+91 98840 27853)

Sanjay Guruprasad   (+91 90032 48190)

Bhargav Narayanan  (+919840783768)

 

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