Come January 30 and BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus at Shameerpet will be abuzz with literary enthusiasts, students from across the country for Verba Maximus, its fifth annual literary festival. The two-day fest will adequately extract speaking, writing talents and also unearth those who deal with mind-games well.
Among the interesting lineup of events is ‘Sherlocked’, on investigative journalism, where students are required to form teams, tested for their deduction and crime solving skills. “This is an event we can afford to call our own.
The Sherlock will work alongside a Dr. Watson to suspect, interrogate and nab the involved,” P Pratyush, as part of the organising team says.
Prior to the event, the organising team travelled to Delhi and Mumbai to pick suitable candidates and ensure a direct entry in the final rounds of the events, ‘Spell Bee’ and ‘Gauntlet’ (includes three rounds of extensive extempore followed by debate). “The ones who couldn’t make it can join the events too, but have to go through the normal procedures like anybody,” he adds.
There’s a regional touch to the fest with ‘ Pada Vinyasam’ for those interested with word-play in Telugu. Based on the series of clues that the organisers announce, the participants need to be at their sharpest-best to solve a crossword puzzle. For those who scrape through the next round, one has to make a story, connecting the Telugu words to a participant.
Other competitions in the fest include ‘Picture Perspective’ (having one to write about an image presented to them), The ‘Newsmaker’ (framing an own news report without references to the story), ‘Youth-Sabha’ (like the mock UN/parliament sessions), group-discussion, lit-quiz, ‘Words of a feather’ (binding words to make a story), ‘Yin Yang’ (write a story in the first round and undo the story of the co-participant in the second). The event will also see author Hari Mohan Paruvu hosting a session, while the curtains would be down with a standup-comedy show by Biswa Kalyan Rath.
