Siliguri, May 15: Students of 13 schools participated in Crossfire, an inter-school debate, organised by The Neotia University in association with The Telegraph at G.D. Goenka School here today.
Around 300 students in the audience listened in rapt attention to the arguments put forward by the students, laughing when the participants made a humorous point and clapping in agreement when they spoke strongly for or against the topic.
St Joseph’s High School won the debate followed by DAV School which came second and there was a tie for the third place between G.D. Goenka School and Army Public School, Bengdubi.
The event started with Parnab Mukherjee, the knowledge resource curator of The Neotia University, holding a session with participants on the format of the debate.
The schools that participated were from in and around Siliguri and each team had four speakers. The debate began with preliminary round which had a turncoat round where the students had to speak for and against a given topic and an extempore round where they had to speak impromptu on topics chosen by lottery.
The students spoke on topics like “books are dead”, “there can be no politics without ethics”, “Indian justice system is a sham” and a “teacher can be replaced by a high-end Wi-Fi enabled laptop” for the turncoat round. “Whistling along”, “the moving eye” and “hot and spicy” were some of the topics in the extempore.
G.D. Goenka School, DAV School, St Joseph’s High School, Matigara, and Army Public School, Bengdubi, qualified for the semi-finals.
“It takes guts to come on stage and speak instinctively in front of an audience and each one of you participating has the courage,” Parnab told the participants.
Apart from putting up arguments, the question-answer session was another feature in the semi-final round where a speaker from one team posed a question to the other team.
The contestants from DAV School and St. Joseph’s High School qualified for the finals where they debated on the topic “we are fashionable Gandhi lovers who don’t care to understand him”.
Students had a hard time in “block and tackle” where Parnab gave one student from each team a debate topic and they would have to speak against a topic when he said “block” and switch back to speaking for the motion when he said “tackle”.
The winning team of St Joseph’s High School were Suvechhya Ghosh, Indrani Saha, Sayani Das and Priyasha Khati.
Ritabrata Mitra of Don Bosco School was the best speaker and Suchismitaa Chakraverty of Birla Divya Jyoti School was the second best speaker.
Saileshree Koirala of Army Public School, Sukna, was the most promising speaker.
