A D SHROFF MEMORIAL ELOCUTION COMPETITION
The winners in the competitions along with the judges and the officials of the Centre
The Centre conducted, in association with the Forum of Free Enterprises, Mumbai, the following contests on 21 August 2010:
A large number of students participated in both contests. The winners were given prizes at the time of the launch of the Loyola Literary Society on 28 August 2010.
- the 46th A D Shroff Memorial Elocution Contest; and
- the 54th All-India Essay-Writing Contest.
A large number of students participated in both contests. The winners were given prizes at the time of the launch of the Loyola Literary Society on 28 August 2010.
POETRY 2010
Poetry 2010 being inaugurated
The Loyola ELT Centre held a 2-day poetry festival called POETRY 2010 on August 27 and 28, 2010. As part of the festival, two poetry contests, one in reading and another in writing, were organized. Forty undergraduate and postgraduate students from 8 colleges and a university took part in the contests which were judged by Commander V V M Krishna, a retired officer of the Indian Navy, and Dr Nagalakshmi, Director (Technical), IMIS Pharmaceuticals. The contests, which were held under the direction of Dr P Ramanujam, Director of the Loyola ELT Centre, were sponsored by The Hindu.
Twenty-nine students participated in the Poetry Reading contest. The poems that were read ranged from traditional ones like those of Blake, Wordsworth, Kipling and Tagore to modern ones like Pablo Neruda’s ‘If You Forget Me’ and Vikram Seth’s ‘The Frog and the Nightingale.’ The criteria for assessment consisted, among other things, of clarity, tone of voice, pause at appropriate places, and the reading speed. Ms K Nitya Sudhakar, a first year intermediate student of Narayana Junior College, Vijayawada, won the first prize (Rs. 1000) for her consummate reading of Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem, ‘A Ballad of Sir Pertab Singh’. Ms D Yamuna, a first year undergraduate student in English literature from Maris Stella College, won the second prize (Rs. 750) for her reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, and the third prize (Rs. 300) winner, Ms Diana Susan, a student of MCA at Andhra Loyola College, read ‘If We Had Never Met’ by Schultz and Williams. ‘The organizers had sent us detailed instructions about the assessment criteria,’ said Susan, a participant. ‘They had also sent a set of practical advice given by Billy Collins, a former poet laureate. They helped me a great deal in my preparation.’
Fourteen students participated in the Poetry Writing contest. They were given six themes, viz. childhood, money, fashion, change, politics and environment, and asked to write a poem of at least 14 lines on one of the themes in 45 minutes. They were allowed to use a dictionary but none of them did so. Childhood received a great deal of attention from the contestants; as many as 6 of them chose to write poems on the theme. Four students wrote on environment and 3 on change. Politics, surprisingly, was the subject matter of only one of the poems. Ms Manpreet Kaur, a first year BA (English Literature) student of Maris Stella College won the first prize of Rs 1500 for her 24-line poem entitled, ‘My Childhoold’. Ms Zareen, a second year BTech student of the NRI Institute of Technology, Pothavarapadu, got the second prize (Rs. 1000) for her poem, ‘Dreaming a World of Lost Conspiracies’, and Mr G Krupa Rao, a first year BSc student of Andhra Loyola College, got the third prize (Rs 750) for his poem, ‘Forever to Remember and Cherish’. Two of the prize-winning poems were on the theme of childhood and one on change.
Manpreet’s poem, ‘My Childhood’, is short, crisp and evocative. Written in simple language shorn of figures of speech, the poem evocatively describes the gifts of childhood which are lost to her now:
I miss those pillow fights
And those Christmas gifts;
I miss the rain dance
And those innocent wishes.
After a good deal of a celebration of her “loss” (the loss of childhood) with romanticized pictures of childhood, she reflects:
All I can do now is lie back
And think of the life I once lived.
Though the poem is marred by the clumsiness and the preachy tone of the concluding lines (‘Childhood, the best of our lives/One should make the best of it’), the poem is a good attempt in verse at awakening one’s sensibility to the missed joys of childhood.
Krupa Rao’s poem (‘Forever to Remember and Cherish’) on the same subject is another attempt at romanticizing childhood but in ponderous lines with a surfeit of descriptive phrases.
Zareen’s poem (‘Dreaming a World of Lost Conspiracies’) views the world as a society of “conspiring spirits” and makes Hamlet-like declarations about setting it right.