By Surya Suresh and Akash Kumar
The Day 3 of the Soapbox held on March 10, started out with the SLC Speaker Soapbox. It was followed by the soapbox for Cultural Affairs Secretary (Arts) and then Cultural Affairs Secretary (Literary). The unanimous candidate for Cultural Affairs Secretary (Arts) Sri Krishna Ravavarapu is a third year student from the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The candidate began with briefing the audience regarding the institute cultural scene and his vision regarding the same.
LitSoc
Sri Krishna promised to make the LitSoc scene in insti more inclusive by ensuring greater participation. He talked about creating club contingents to make sure that insti students can get to be more involved in cultural scene in and around Chennai. He also talked about LitSoc bluebook and a TV at Himalaya displaying relevant LitSoc information.
PG Involvement
Sri Krishna emphasized on proper information dissemination and publicity to reach out to the post graduate students. He talked about a cultural orientation for freshmen PG students and an introduction session for the literary and social secretaries of the PG hostels.
Clubs and Festivals
The candidate promised to open two new clubs from the next session; Gameplex, a club for gaming enthusiasts and Ethos, a club for classical and folk arts. He proposed to hold a performing arts festival, insti wide ethnic day and Indian week as a platform to showcase diverse Indian art forms in collaboration with the Samithis.
Saarang
Moving to Saarang, the candidate promised to make it an experience to remember and to retain its position as the largest cultural festival in Chennai and South India. He proposed a long term impact driven social campaign, a formalized alumni mentoring by the former organizing committee members, regular surveys to understand the GSB better and to focus on Saarang’s publicity in Chennai. Adding on to that, he talked about night engagement during Saarang and the expansion of ambience of Saarang through crowd sourcing to Sangam.
Q&A
The Q&A session was opened by the outgoing Cultural Affairs Secretary (Arts), Gokulesh TG. To the question of the continuance of last year’s Social Responsibility Campaign of Saarang, the candidate replied in positive saying it was also part of his manifesto. Gokulesh also questioned the need for having a separate Bluebook considering that it was already there on the Sangam website. Sri Krishna responded by noting that the new bluebook could be downloaded in a PDF format and students may prefer offline media. Sri Krishna responded in the affirmative to the outgoing Cul-Sec’s query whether he understood the issues of setting up a gaming club in insti. Sri Krishna responded that he was aware that he would be questioned regarding the promotion of violence through these games and he believed that these issues could be sorted out with the administration. The question and answer session followed by a question from the current SLC speaker, Venkataraman Ganesh where he asked the candidate to clearly differentiate the distinction between Cultural Affairs Secretary (Arts) and Cultural Affairs Secretary (Literary) and why he was interested in the former. Giving a rough demarcation, the candidate added that he was the literary secretary of his hostel and therefore had to deal with both literary and arts activities. In the process, he found out that he was more interested in arts and so he decided to contest for the same. With not much enthusiasm from the audience regarding questioning the candidate, the soapbox concluded leaving the floor open for the much-awaited soapbox of the Cultural Affairs Secretary (Literary).
