PGDAV College

Eclectica- Report for the session 2016-17

Eclectica- The English Literary Society of the college planned a plethora of fun filled activities and events for the session 2016-17. The annual self composed poetry recitation competition was held on September 25, 2016. The purpose of this event was to bring out the latent talent of the students, which hides somewhere in the corners of the four walled classrooms. The event was followed by a movie screening on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

Childhood is the most beautiful season of life. The participants revisited sweet and sour memories of their childhood with their poems based on the theme Childhood Revisited. The judges for the event were Mr. Mukesh Bhairwa, Ms. Jyoti Kathpalia and Ms. Aleya Giri. There were 20 participants in all with four prizes on the grab- 3 for conventional poetry and 1 for the newly introduced slam session. The first prize was bagged by Namya Kaushic, second by Amrit Versha and the third by Jaideep Singh. Devansh Chaudhary won the prize for the slam poetry. From wanting to role-play ‘Batman’ to finding best friends in the trees, to reliving cherished memories where the hardest decision was to choose the ice cream flavor, to upsetting over uncontrollable appetite, everybody’s childhood had it all.

The society geared up and expanded its horizons with the launch of Constellation’17, its first ever annual department festival- an amalgamation of academia and some exciting events. It provided a platform for students from colleges across the city to hone their talents and engage in a plethora of intellectually stimulating delightful activities. This edition was held on 20th-21^st February, 2017. The theme for the same was Journeys: Metaphorical and Actual.

The two day festival began with the Student Paper Presentation Competition scheduled on Day 1. Through this competition, the society endeavored to delve deeper into the phenomenon of daily interests, which seem rather subtle on the outside but have myriad layers to its being. The judges for this event were Dr. R.N Bhardwaj (our retired senior faculty), Ms. Renu Kapoor and Mr. Dharamraj. The first prize was bagged by Aditya Pant, second by SVD Chandrashekhar and third by S. Bhavsudha. The audience unraveled newer identities by evaluating journeys of characters from popular works of literature such as Funny Boys, God of Small Things, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Catcher in the Rye, amongst many others. The participants also discussed refugees and their identity crisis. A few of them linked spiritual journey with science fiction and assessed humanity through changes across the centuries from Marxist perspectives. This event attracted participants from 10 colleges in the city.
Day 2 commenced with Kaliedoscript- an unconventional creative writing competition that involves a video played in loop. It was judged by Ms. Megha Sharma and Ms. Pritika Nehra. The participants had to base their pieces of writing from an instance in the video. The first prize went to Kritika Singh, second to Shilpa Dwivedi and the third to Karishma Sahoo. The event was followed by an In-Costume Monologue competition, wherein students not only had to dress up like their favorite characters from any works of literature but also enact a monologue. Ms Jyoti Kathpalia and Ms. Vandana Agarwal were the judges for the event. Ayush Awasthi and Sheh Yadav won the prizes in order respectively. On both days of the event, the society organized Bring Your Own Book- the great book barter fair which was a huge success. A book for a book educates the youth! Over 500 books were exchanged. Eclectica hopes the festival becomes a yearly tradition.

Kanika Sahijwani
Secretary, Eclectica