23 schools of Delhi NCR participated in Convergence
2014 a two-day festival of Knowledge and word artistry organised by the Air
Force School within its school premises on 23 -24 July 2014 .The festival was a knitting together of the
three seemingly different genres of Debating, Quizzing and Creative Writing .
The beauty of this program lay in the versatility of the school teams which combined
their skills in the three areas to compete for the top position.
TAFS has been holding the Inter School
Debate for the past two decades, while it stepped into the quizzing five years
ago. Changing its previous format the school created an exciting new event, thereby
broadening its scope.
The Central theme of the
event was War, Conflict and the Peace
initiatives of the 20th and the ongoing 21st Century. The
present year- 2014 is a year of commemoration of four major memory fragments in
the collective consciousness of the human race. This year marks the Centenary
of World War I, 75 years of World War II, two major Indian landmarks- 100
years of Gandhiji's return voyage from South Africa to India and the centenary
of the historic Ghadar Party that fought for India's freedom from the distant
shores all across the world.
These were the sub -themes running through all
the three genres.
July 23, 2014-The Preliminary
Round
The preliminary round
consisted of extempore and turncoat debate.
Topics for the extempore debate
Pool A: Those who selectively forget history are permanently condemned to
repeat it.
Pool B: History by its own nature cannot be neutral.
Topics for Turncoat
Crises
Collateral
Confront
Shrapnel
Refugee
Ethnicity
Exclusion
Enclave
Holocaust etc (Each
turncoat speaker was given a single word to construct his debate)
The debating teams
answered a written quiz. The third member of the team wrote poems (Sculpt-a-Poem.)
In Sculpt – a- Poem three
images from the chosen periods were displayed. The first picture
displayed articles used by Gandhi without showing the leader himself. The
second image was the execution by firing squad of a group of Indian rebels in
Singapore .These rebels had been inspired by the philosophy of the Gadar Party.
The third image displayed use of biological and chemical weapons in World War
I. The poems had to broadly revolve around the theme and sub-text of the
images. The participants had to prepare the first
draft, second draft and the final draft of the poem. Along with the final poem
they had to submit the first two drafts to show how the poem had been crafted.
The
evolution, editing, re-drafting, re-structuring and the journey of the final
poem were marked and not just the final draft. To read the award winning
entries follow the link given below:
POEMS
July 24,
2014: Semi –Finals, Final- Face Off
Ten teams made it to the semi-finals and
participated in the classical extempore debate and rounds of quizzing.
Addressing the students
before the semi-finals Mr Pranab Mukherjee, the moderator and quiz master of
the events remarked that school quizzing teaches students to analyze. Hence
quizzing is a parallel curriculum-neither extra-curricular nor co-curricular.
He appreciated the efforts of The Air Force School for changing the format
completely despite a history of 20 years of debating. The reinvented Debate
closed the distance between Debate, Quizzing and Writing.
Topics for Semi Finals
Pool A: This
House believes that People’s History of
themselves always differs from the official history of people
Pool B: This house believes that Revolutions are fought on the streets not
on Facebook
Two teams D .A .V Gurgaon
and Modern School ,Barakhamba reached the final face off round where the three
members of each team indulged in intense debating including the Block and
Tackle format followed by quizzing.
The winners of the
creative writing competition read their poems before the audience.
The Results of the Event
are as follows: