CHENNAI: These self-professed nerds would take up topics of international relations and economics over sports and pop culture any day. Nevertheless, no topic or team could come in the way of their thunderous win - India’s first at the World Schools Debating Championships(WSDC) 2019 in Bangkok.
Tejas Subramaniam, Bhavya Shah, Manya Gupta, Saranya Ravindran and Prithvi Arun have bagged the championship that is usually dominated by native English-speaking countries like Australia, which has won the championship the most times, followed by England.
Chennai's own Tejas Subramaniam has been awarded the title of 'Best speaker in the world' and Bhavya Shah ended up as the sixth-best speaker in the world. Another Indian team member Manya Gupta was ranked the 14th best speaker in the world.
Members of the team were speaking to the press on Friday after their win at an event organised by the Indian Schools Debating Society supported by the Ramco group as part of its CSR initiatives.
The team defeated Canada in the final, proposing the motion "This house regrets the glorification of soldiers as heroes".
They won 9-0, which meant all nine judges unanimously voted for India’s win, a feat that the Indian Schools Debating Society says has not been achieved by any country in the last decade.
First visually impaired speaker to debate in the final
Bhavya Shah, a student of Rao Junior College of Science in Mumbai, is the team's 'Funny guy', a trait that has spilled over to his debate matches.
Bhavya became the first visually impaired speaker to debate in a WSDC final and to make it among the top 10 speakers.
He shared some of his most memorable moments.
When debating against Canada opposing the motion “This House would ban the practice of ‘importing brides’, Canada’s argument was that if importing brides were to be legalised, other refugees would be affected because of the opportunity cost," Bhavya said.
“So, I argued that this was an argument against any other form of immigration. What if team Canada so decides, ‘we don’t want Indians coming into the country because they’re better at debating than we are?',” he said.
Point made, the team went on to win defeat the Canadians 3-0.
The best speaker in the world
It may be news to the family that Tejas Subramaniam is the ‘best speaker in the world’, but his mother Vinutha Subramaniam says he was already the best speaker in their household.
“After one point, he knew too many things. So, we couldn’t debate with him. He started speaking quite early. By the time, he was 1, he could speak complete sentences. At around 2, he would speak a sentence in Tamil and be able to repeat it in English, so much so that we would call him ‘Major Sundarrajan’,” Vinutha said.
The team had already prepared 140 motions before the championships with the help of their coaches Dhruva Bhat, Sayeqa Islam and Dhananjay Ashok among others.
“There was not a single topic that we were baffled by,” said Saranya, student of Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan Senior Secondary School in Chennai.
However, while the team had made giant strides this year, slugging it out on the global debating circuit was quite another experience.
“Because we are accented, sometimes I think we are not understood. Like, for example, when the judges give us our feedback, they tell us you made a new argument in your third speech when we clearly made it in our earlier speeches too,” Tejas, also a student of Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan Senior Secondary School in Chennai, told Express.