This piece of writing is mostly for myself. I want this to act as my journal. I've always tried to see life from others' perspective. I think it's time to see it from mine. This can act as a rough draft of my life.
If you're very nosy and want to kn...
My college now has a set of people who go for the various cultural fests we get invited to. So I don't feel like participating in them. But I do take part in intellectual fests like I did today.
First off, I didn't know that this popular college in my city even had a fest let alone an academic one. But yeah, don't judge a book by it's cover.
I was participating in a full day event called Tessalate with my friend Scarlett Gurtley (let's just say Gurtley for ease). The description for that event didn't say much about it but we participated anyways.
Honestly, we participated just for fun. We weren't even supposed to be the contingent for the event. We were the OTSE (On The Spot Entry). But there was some goof up because of which we got 'upgraded' as a contingent.
Oh, for the record, our beloved Darcy was the CL (Contingent Leader) of our college for this fest. Thus goof-ups were inevitable.
Gurtley and I reached the college about half an hour before the event and during registration, realised that our names weren't there on the list. Instead, they had the list of names who had backed out of the event long back. WTF?!
We tried to find Darcy and found her competing at her own event. Ofcourse she claimed that she had informed the concerned people about the change. We didn't bother her much and decided to deal with the situation ourselves. I spoke to the head of that department and got a deal for ourselves. Gurtley and I would be contingent 1 and two others from my college would be contingent 2.
The event was delayed by an hour. All the 35 teams (note the number people, 35 teams) had to wait in the adjacent room to kill time.
An hour passed and the event began. And now is the time to tell you what exactly was this vague-descriptive event all about.
As soon as we entered the room, which looked like this,
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the organisers separated the teammates and made them sit away from one another. The two members of a team were given the same topic and two minutes to prepare for it, separately. After the end of two minutes, the teammates would have to present the topic in such a way that the audience thinks that the two had prepared for the topic together. The teammates were given no time for preparation once they were together.
After one teammate starts speaking, a gong would be sounded at random after which the other teammate must continue the same sentence where the first teammate left off. To make things more difficult, the organisers held cue cards with certain words such as 'candles' 'investment' 'furniture', etc. which which had to use in our speech to get extra points.
35 teams were taking part out of which only 6 teams would advance to the next round. The chances were that slim.
My first reaction. Shit, this is extempore. SHITTTTTTT. MY NEMESIS. I CAN'T BELIEVE I TOOK PART FOR EXTEMPORE.
Gurtley and my topic was 'Economic effect of charging sanitary napkins at 12% GST while items such as condoms have tax exemption'. Honestly, I couldn't think of a lot of stuff to say cause I was stressed out.
But boy did we do well. Gurtley came up with points and started the sentences and after the gong, I easily picked up where she left off and completed the sentence so that Gurtley could start with a new sentence and the cycle continues. We also successfully used all of the cue words in front of us.
Gurtley and I were pretty satisfied with our performance. The two others with us also showered us with praises. Those two unfortunately we're the first ones to present so they fucked up big time. Honestly, I would have considered this a win even if we just went over to the next round.
And we did! Infact, we were told that we came first in that round. First out of 35 teams. That's a blood accomplishment! Dude, I'm super proud of myself.
These second round consisted of a series of challenges. There were six columns of benches in the room. Each team was given a slate and marker and would start from the last bench (refer to the picture) and we could move to the further bench once we got 20 points in that particular challenge. The challenges were:
Challenge 1- Family Fued (total my round) Challenge 2- 2 Truths, 1 Lie (Eco based) Challenge 3- Watching a video and describing it using Eco terms. Only the terms which didn't overlap with the other teams were counted. Challenge 4- Psych (which got delayed and then cancelled half way due to shortage of time) Challenge 5- Giving edgy headlines to wierd scenarios (total Gurtley round)
It was a tough competition but all the teams reached the third and final round, the scavenger hunt. Due to shortage of time, we had to complete a 45 min task in 30 mins.
Scavenger hunt was a rollercoaster. We ran soooooo much. Some of the items were: -> taking a picture with 7 fest logos in the frame -> 3 items that everyone buys in a month (we even ran to the nearby station for milk) -> make three strangers say 'betty bought a butter but the butter was bitter' (one asshole of a guy gave us a tough time) -> naming three companies which were included in the fest's mock stock competition -> finding people with coloured hair other than blonde or red -> A GoT or HP merch -> item with 1000 cal, ETC.
We took a little more than 15 mins and got disqualified. So yeah, all the effort went down the drain. I really thought we would have been in the top 3 but no, we didn't win. Infact, our college didn't win a single thing. That's pretty shameful. Oh, guess who did win the whole thing then? That's right, my old college.
I've come back home now and my body is broke! I know we didn't win but I am super proud of myself for getting through to that second round.
That was a much needed boost after last month's serious predicament.
