Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Debate : A Renegade Perspective

(begin serious tone)
(edit : Mayank's posted another review, and mayhaps this one contains the same points or even conflicting ones. I'm calling a spade a spade in mine - read and make what you have to out of it.)

I think that the club Secy Mr. Raina, Mayank has been more than diplomatic with his review/report.
I shall belabor the reader with a few things he didn't mention, though he promises to come out with a DOs and DON'Ts section, I'd rather say all of these things in my caustic tongue, because he just loves to love you all so much, and all that he says is sugary sweet.) which are these:

1. Beating Around the Bush Syndrome.
In Debate 1, there were 8 people in the fray. Only one of them (that's right, just one) came even remotely close to the true meaning of the topic. Thus the debate never occurred. It's a stark observation, but only 50% of the debate happened because none but one came close the topic.

2. Paper Reading Syndrome
It is humanly possible to prepare for a debate which has to happen in a few hours and not paper read. The teams in the debate had days, and paper reading was rampant. I could count the speakers who did not paper read (correction: read the paper 3-4 times only during the debate - look at the benchmark!) on four fingers of my right hand.

3. Vomit Factor
Empty Rhetoric = crappy debate.
A lot of teams fell prey to rhetoric either during the debate or during the questions. KP was out of control during the rebuttle. Kaura went berserk trying to steamroller the other team's arguments during his debate, losing perspective in empty rhetoric.

4. Redundancy
Most teams kept on elaborating upon the same points in their debates. They also kept asking the same questions over and over again in the rebuttle. Redundant answers were given.

5. Copy Pasting
Many people had copy-pasted their entire speeches from the net. Right from the ideas to the punctuation. This is plain wrong. The net is for research only.

6. Presentation
or rather, the lack of it. I shall not elaborate further - only that the participants were lackadaisical enough to not even bother to read each others' debates. This ruined the flow of the debate, and most of all made the rebuttle rounds pathetic and intolerable.

8 comments:

Magic Mukul said...

after reading the reviews it almost looks like that judges are following a good-cop-bad-cop routine...hope it works

the turncoat said...

take on lesson no 3, mentioned in an alternate review please?

Liar Goodspeed said...

@mukul - good cop bad cop? aren't we both saying the same thing?
Two different perspectives, Raina is lambasting people in his own way and i am encouraging speakers to be flawless by doing a head-on with their mistakes.

Magic Mukul said...

okay u r d gud cop...

happy?

Liar Goodspeed said...

@mukul - maturity, please?
(my tone isn't acerbic)

Captain Grim said...

rehotori question - what is with rodi nd the beatalica ?

mayank said...

@ rodeja : maturity ? elaborate (genuinely surprised)

Liar Goodspeed said...

@raina - I assume you meant maturity in context of what mukul said. I elaborate - I didn't think the two different perspectives on the debate were a Judge's 'battle', or even something the judges did consciously (which mukul clearly hints at). The two different reviews were two different perspectives, of two people with similar motives. When I elaborated upon that, Mukul passed a wink-wink comment - 'you good cop. happy now?'
I, then told him in my comment to be serious here and not immature - by comparing two reviews, saying good cop bad cop.
And just to dispel any misunderstanding, i said clearly that my tone wasn't acerbic - it was even with a smile.