Rethinking College Fests and other society activities.

(Click here to read this article in Hindi.)

Any discussion about learning atmosphere in a college like SRCC is incomplete without talking about the training that the students seek to acquire from the institutions that arguably take up the maximum of their college time and effort: the societies.

The insane time commitment that societies require start showing its symptoms right from the orientation itself, which is obviously followed by multiple layers of selection process. The dilemma of attending orientations of so many societies and going through their lengthy procedure of recruitment often makes students miss important lectures in their initial college classes itself.

On top of it, the lofty claims of a productivity intense experience, and the quintessential advice of seniors that a CV decorated with maximum societies is a must for placement, result in students committing to multiple societies which can be hardly managed with academics in college. To make matters worse, the faculties often do not cooperate with students who have taken on a lot of society work, or who are post holders. They show little interest and are not inclined to give much credit for the work in societies. There is an overall incompatibility in the nature of interaction between academics and non-academics in our college.

Now, after demanding so much from the students, is the learning outcome from society as good as expected? Our experience says it is not. A closer inspection of how a society functions the whole year round will make it clear that this issue actually takes root in the ill proportioned weight given to the conduction of fests by societies.

Unlike the primary objective for which they were made, most societies function to pull out one so called grand fest. All focus, resources, efforts are guided towards this one goal without accounting for its use, productivity, skill enhancement and genuine participation.

The real quality and quantity of work in terms of published papers and articles, or artistic achievement, knowledge gained, occupies the backseat. This is not to degrade commendable work done by many societies for example the Debating Society which conducts many mock debates to familiarize, improvise and enthuse the skills of its members with regards to Parliamentary Debating (although the number and excellence of these mock sessions depends on a great deal on the efforts of the post holders of any current year); or Aarohan (the Indian music society) coaching its members to whet their talents through regular practice and recording sessions. Obviously, these few examples are not the only societies which are able to deliver on useful benefits for their members. The point is that while each society has the potential to give an enriching experience to its members, these efforts are overwhelmed by the fest culture that has become so established in SRCC.

It is understandable that fests are attractive because they give a high visibility to the societies, and in many cases resources for their initiatives throughout the year. Thus, while we are not asking to do away with fests completely, we believe that having them as the main objective of a society does result in subpar level of learning.

We would like to point out that we understand that it is incorrect to state that organizing fests leads to no learning at all. It does have its own share of learning, in terms of getting equipped with management skills, learning how to function under extreme performance pressure, and understanding team work. This is all very valuable. However does this justify completely sidelining the individual characteristic model of a society, and depriving the members of the unique development that can come with association with a society which has a specialized area? If we have around 50 societies and the only thing that majority teach is how to organize fests, then it is a totally unproductive system. 50 societies should ideally mean nurturing 50 interests and 50 different skill sets from which the students must have a choice to follow their interest.

Moreover, even while we acknowledge that we can learn from the experience of handling a huge fest, it is not as if this learning is always meaningful for all members,or there are no faults in the way we organize fests. The sponsorship work boils down to making incessan, mundane calls to corporate companies, marketing work boils down to mindless and over the top spamming, organising work boils down to doing laborious work requiring and improving hardly any skills. One case in point is how many students of the organising wing of Youth Conference were given the sole task of forming a human chain whenever any speaker arrived. So the actual, valuable experience and learning of organizing events is not available for everyone, and in most cases the most worthy experiences are reserved only for the seniors and post holders. This becomes even more worrisome when we reflect on the various factors which make the position of being a post holder inaccessible to so many.

Moreover, all this comes with frequent and highly unproductive meetings. At times, students have to bunk entire lectures for just 15-minutes, poorly planned meetings. The agenda of the meetings is to either pool in ideas about some issue, or to make some decision of the seniors known to the juniors. Except for a few well structured brainstorming meetings, the rest of the work can easily be done via WhatsApp groups. The tradition, though, mandates that first-year students can not miss these highly ineffective meeting, and neither can they seriously question this practice. If someone dares to convey their displeasure about missing classes, they are served with hot remarks by seniors, like- “we are missing our classes too; our seniors were even stricter; we didn’t attend any lecture of 2-3 subjects in our freshman year”. Is this trade off worth it? Before these questions can even materialize, bunking classes becomes a norm, a symbol of being cool and productive.

If we take a look at the final event itself, then the way it is structured seems to be unsatisfactory. In most of the college fests, students other than society members are just passive spectators and not active participants. It is focused on speaker sessions, hired performers, stalls etc where contribution from students is not necessitated. These fests, therefore, instead of looking like “our fest” look like a show. Here also, there can be exceptions. For instance, the fine arts society fest which organizes events for students. These events and programs where students of our college participate and perform are important because they can be an opportunity to expose talents in our college. Events like drawing exhibitions, poetry gatherings , stage performances, paper presentations and so on, which are open to all students without restricting to particular society members should be given more attention than just planting a costly glamorous celebrity on the stage. These kinds of events also have the potential to foster collective spirit and belongingness in the college for people with different interests.

These fests become undesirable not just because of the above mentioned factors, but also because they lead to inconveniences not limited to the society members.

For instance, due to multiple fests spread throughout the semester, academics are constantly hit by it. Almost every day in the fest season, the co-op area and front lawns (and while the auditorium was functioning, that too) have some events going on which are accompanied by loud music, announcements, and so on. This noise is obviously disturbing for the classes, and the events after events make classes distracted for a large part of the even semesters. Adding to this is the problem of numerous mass bunks in the fest season which reduce the academic days, resulting in squeezing the already constrained time for class.

Moreover,the repetition of the same kind of events, especially speaker sessions, results in students losing interest in these activities. Consequently, many a times even important and significant speakers fail to get enough audience which is embarrassing for both the college and the speaker. To save the situation, society members are compulsorily made to attend their events, or they resort to inviting school kids. In case of most of the fests, students other than the society members fail to even recognize which event is going on in a particular day.

Another important problem with the multiple fests is the resource wastage associated with it. Fests use plastic, paper, flex boards and other resources for the promotion and for the decoration of college on the fest day. This is a totally unsustainable culture and should not be appreciated by a generation aware about its consequences.

If we abandon the system of multiple monotonous fests, and fests of various societies could be synchronized and done together as one technical fest and one cultural fest where every society can have events organised under these umbrella fests , then it could solve the inconvenience to classes, will help in maintaining enthusiasm, reduce wastage, make it easier for students to manage academics in fest season, and most significantly, solve the problem we started out with; it will do away with overemphasis on fests which harm the overall functioning of the society. .

The point is that when the race for the best fest is eliminated by a common fest, it will lead societies to engage in more significant activities, promoting better learning and opportunities to distinguish themselves, since depending on making their fest bigger will not fetch anything now. This will also reduce competition among societies about the flamboyancy of fest and instead promote cooperation.

The money spent on fests will then also be better accounted for, and too much dependence on corporates which indirectly causes elitism can be eliminated too.

Though our suggestion is a hard task, the merits of this move weigh enough for students and particularly Students’ Union to consider this seriously. Societies and fests should be spaces of creative expression and happiness and not burdens, or stress generators, or annoyances.