NTU BP IV's

Or How I Fared in My First College Tournament

Getting to NTU:
Getting to NTU is a bit of a process, which kind of reveals how incredibly spoilt I have gotten to the fact that everything is really close by in Singapore. NTU is, pretty much as far as you're going to get in terms of transit in Singapore, it's right out at the eastern edge and takes, yes ladies and gentlemen, an Entire Hour to get to, by public transit. There involves a change of two metro lines, and the taking of one bus, and costs an incredible 2 dollars each way. That's almost Rs 60. In retrospect, that's not that bad at all, but lets face it, 2 dollars a trip is a bit pricy. Enough rants about expeditures.
The campus itself is large, florid and quite pritty. It unfortunately bears resemblance to IIT Kanpur, both in structure and in spirit. The lecture theatres are quite the same, albiet airconditioned, and the building style is well, engineery. I'm glad, very glad I didn't chose to spend my college years doing engineering, it would not have suited me at all.
Enough rants about my college choices.
The tournanment was to start bright and early at nine in the morning, with registration at 8 30. We arrived, a mere five minutes late, to find out most people didn't share our ideals of punctuality. The tournament eventually started at about ten thirty, with the first round of debating, and I did pretty well for myself. As a whip speaker, and with a teammate who started his extension in his sixth minute, I came in 2nd, and earned myself two points.
Diversion: I enjoy doing Opp. Whip, it's got a horribly perverse tone to it, and suits me well.
The next three debates were awful, for completely different reasons. I shall not delve too much into them, and instead get to the meaty bits. The Semifinals, and Finals.
Two SMU Teams broke into the Semifinals, SMU A and SMU B (surprise surprise). SMU A, consisting of Shuvam and Priyam henceforth referred to as The Power Couple, scraped through from what I heard into the Finals, from their draw. SMU B, from what I witnessed and cheered on with, had a pretty clear cut victory through the finals. Things were generally set up for a fun time. Two SMU Teams, two NTU teams, opening house NTU, closing house SMU, it was a recepie for disaster. The motion before the house was "Nations are Rouge only when Confronted", and the opening government, NTU A, decides to squirrel.
A squirrel is when you completely change the spirit of the motion, to suit your needs, because you are a bastard of the first order.
Thus, the entire debate, for some reason, got centered in Myanmar, and discussed how the government side wished to propose sanctions on the country, so as to force them into dialogue, or something which was far far more confusing than that. This effectively made it...a terrible debate, and killed any chance Closing Government had of making sense, as they had a flimsy case to support. Joey and Amira,(SMU B) thus lost out. Big time. But all was well and good, for SMU A Saved The Day(forgive me for rhyming) and came out with a brilliantly done extension to win the house. Adjudication took only five minutes, before results were announced. SMUDS had just won it's first local BP IV. Not bad for a club that's three years old. Not bad at all.

Hopefully, by next year, I'll be breaking and competing in the finals for similiar guts and glory, it's good to be on a winning team, a winning institution, years at RKP have got me really used to it.