When Two Opposites Meet
“Today I speak to you as a practitioner of public policy who has had the opportunity to work at the intersection of public policy analysis…
“Today I speak to you as a practitioner of public policy who has had the opportunity to work at the intersection of public policy analysis…
Survive, Tackle, Extrapolate, Win – STEW, the first Speaking Event of the year for freshies had three rounds that followed an elimination process. Beginning with an Extempore round where the participants spoke for thirty seconds on typically punny or funny topics and followed by the Block and Tackle session, where contestants had to Block (speak For) or Tackle (speak Against) a given two-way topic as instructed by the judges, the evening ended with a grand Shipwreck Face-off, where the ‘celebrities’ (or the identities conferred upon each contender) argued and pleaded for that elusive spot on a life boat.
No planet in the solar system has captured public imagination like the red planet, with more than 100,000 people signing up for a one-way trip to Mars when applications opened this year. Mars was the topic of the evening when Dr. Anita Sengupta delivered her speech at the Media Resource Centre in the Central Library at 5.30 pm on Tuesday, 20th of August.
Conducted by Aravindabharathi R and Prateek Vijayavargia, Quiz Club Conveners 2013-14, it witnessed a good turnout. The lecture room was filled with freshies vying for spots in the finals. With 30 questions spanning a wide variety of topics, the preliminary round filtered out all but the best eight teams. The finals were extensive and entertaining, with themed rounds like the ‘House Posters’ and ‘Lego Re-enactments’ giving everyone a chance at quick inference.
Climbing up the stairs towards what used to be Tifanys, you are greeted with the image of a tub of ice cream, which is ironic, since Suprabaa don’t seem to serve any (not yet, they say).
Today, there is an availability of data about people and society on an unprecedented scale. “This can only mean,” Dr. Anand says, “that we are now on the cusp of a revolution in the social sciences.”
In 2009, a few enthusiastic first-year undergraduate students of IITM chanced upon theories of certain ionospheric phenomena and proposed to investigate them in a plausible space mission – and thus was born the IIT-Madras Student Satellite Project, or iitmsat.
A small group gathered at MRC on the afternoon of 11th August to participate in a discussion on India’s serially neglected group – the Dalits – and the ignominy of manual scavenging.
With the sheer multitude of activities under its umbrella, NSS touches a significant number of lives – the lives of the groups for whose benefit NSS activities are organised, and the lives of the volunteers and team members themselves.
Unless you are a mountain goat (or close), climbing stairs can make one breathless and sitting still can tire you out. Yet, walk into a classroom with smiling faces and voices that chime “Thank you, Ma’am!” for returning their chorused “Good morning!” and you can’t help but grab a book, grin back and plunge right into a story.