Feature

Delightful Experience in Singapore

Ryan Nabil

THE four-day long World Scholar's Cup World Final, 2009 was hosted at Nanyang Girls High School, Singapore. More than two hundred participants hailing from fifteen countries (Australia, Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States, United Kingdom and Vietnam) participated there. DemiDec organized the international academic event where the core components were essay, scholar's challenge, scholar's bowl, debate and scavengers photo hunt. Based on the theme the Fall of Empires, there were six subjects, which are Literature, History, Visual Arts, Economics, Science and Mathematics.

The competition kicked off on June 12 with Scholar's Scavenge Photo Hunt, where we were divided into eighteen groups and asked to take photos with different items and in different settings of Singapore within a 3-hour deadline. We had to scavenge throughout Singapore to take photos with different traditional items such as double-decker bus, hotel menu and also unconventional things like living cows. But where would we get cows in Singapore except in pictures! In addition, we had to videotape ourselves while singing songs in public places, convince hotel boys to do pushups for extra-points and feign mannequin. In a nutshell, Scholar's Scavenge was one of the most exciting events of the WSC and it also helped us to get to know the places better in Singapore.

On the following day, the main event started with essay writing, where we were supposed to write an essay either on 'advising a potential emperor on building up a sustainable and powerful empire' or 'The pros and cons and implications of using nuclear power.' Then we gave MCQ exams on each of the six subjects at the Nanyang Girls' High School auditorium. There were two events, one was individual and the other was group event. My group was USBangladesh.

As the group-name suggests the ethnicities of our team, the nomenclature of our team takes us to the formation of the team USBangladesh. As the tournament was in July and most of the people who would be interested in participating were busy with their exams, I could not find any teammate. So I mailed DemiDec to team me up with participants from other countries. Two potential scholars from different states of the United States were also looking for their teammates. Therefore, DemiDec put the three let-out participants in a single team and the team USBangladesh was thus formed, comprising of Bunnie Hadsall from Arizona , Todd Medema from California and me from Bangladesh

Debate was somewhat fun, as we got to know about the different debating styles of the debaters from different countries. However, the speech was approximately three-minutes long and didn't allow any Point of Information. As a result, the original vigour of the debate was missing. We participated in two debates, one against a team from Taiwan and the other against the Korean team. We won both of the debates. The resolutions were

'That empire and democracy are contradictory' and 'That sustainable development could be achieved without major changes in human lifestyle'. Six participants were selected from six countries for the showcase debate that followed.

Sunday, the last official day of the competition started with a buffet breakfast at the 5-star Park Hotel Clarke Quay. Then we headed off to Nanyang where fifteen representatives of fifteen participating countries had the honour to bear their national flags in the flag march. I carried the Bangladeshi flag as I was the only participant from Bangladesh, preceded by the flag-bearer of Australia and followed by the flag-bearer of China. Then we had the Scholar's Bowl, the lengthiest event of the World Scholar's Cup. Each team was given a remote-control device and we were to answer questions on the projector screen by pressing any of the six options on the remote-control device within fifteen seconds. It took a while to get the network working and once it started, we were fascinated at the state-of-the-art technology that was used in the competition.

Lastly, there was a farewell dinner-where the participating teams had the last taste of Singaporean cuisine and the individual best scorer from each school were awarded Bronze medal at the end of the dinner. The theme of the next World Scholar's Cup was also declared and that is 'It is time for a shift from the Fall of Empires to a World Divided'.