karma police

part one: why debate at all

If anything should hint at how much I absolutely love and adore debate: it's that I still remember the first three motions I ever debated. The first was about the ethics of gene editing, the second was about the cultural significance of baggy genes, and the third was whether India should fund space research. I even remember the cases I ran, as horribly underdeveloped as I now consider them. “Baggy jeans don't even make you look cooler, you just look like a waddling penguin”, and apparently that was funny enough to win the debate.

All of this started in a seemingly unrelated after-school class I loved. It was a safe haven from the intellectual rot and mindless cruelty that defines the Indian education system – we learnt about Picasso's Blue Period and Bruce Springsteen's protest music and engaged in the tradition of re-writing Shakespeare using modern-day slang. But we also got to talk and express ourselves – we wrote science fiction thrillers and rom-coms and we wrote scripts for plays that we acted horribly in (but always feeling like we were Rami Malek reborn).

It was also the first time I ever participated in a debate. And it's here that I discovered the thrill of debate. It's the single reason that I fell in love with debate. It's the closest I feel to being alive. The five seconds JUST before I start my debate speeches are the absolute worst. But the 5 minutes that follow are the absolute best – the feeling of absolute composure and control. The desperate rush to quickly come up with refutation, the playing with words in your head to find the most decisive phrasing, and the deep, smug, petty, primal satisfaction when it all works and the audience showers you with applause.

It's this feeling that has driven my love for debate since. It's when I begin to fall in love with argumentation and the crux of debate itself – and started tuning into what passes for “debate” on Indian news channels, or immersing myself in the world of Model UN to a wild and irrational degree, or converting every real-life decision and conversation into a kind of grand debate that I had to win (my mom makes the dubious claim that I still do this).

Having since moved to Canada and seen the well-developed culture of high-school debate gives me mixed feelings then – on one hand, I can't stop thinking about how much better I would be by now – if I redirected all of this effort in ways that were channelled appropriately, with real structures around me supporting this hobby. But I similarly shudder when I think about that life – being shepherded to debate academies and highly-competitive tournaments across the country and strategically optimising debate strategy would've likely made the whole thing seem less magical and exhilarating. I doubt I would've sustained the passion for as long.

The other thing debate made me do is be forced to consider “the other side” on an almost instinctual level. This is something that originally just served me to be less dogmatic in my thinking and have a more nuanced understanding of big, global issues like feminism, but in the long run permeated into my daily life to just make me a more generally empathetic person. This obsession with generating both “for” and “against” arguments became the lens through which I saw the world, and for a slightly socially stunted young me, I began to understand those around me a little better. I generated little cases in my head for their behaviours and actions – and began to see why they did the things they did, in ways I could fundamentally not see before.

Maybe my teachers didn't deeply hate me, or maybe that friend wasn't just being an asshole – perhaps there were deeper, underlying things – like upbringings, educational systems, and different ways of thinking that came in the way, and that their actions had to be necessarily interpreted through those lens. Everything I'm saying right now may seen like just Empathy 101 to an older, emotionally well-adjusted audience, but it's something that at least I had to actively cultivate at a young age. Debate gave me the tools to understand the world, the people in it and the systems that made it up, far before it taught me the intricacies of social justice or International Relations or philosophy.

For a more nuanced take on how debate and empathy interplay in the real world, check out this excellent episode of the Structural Reasons Podcast with Ashish Kumar.

All of this is to say that a lot of specifics change through the course of this series: the formats I debate in, the places I debate in, even the people I debate with – but the two things I've described above remain adamantly unmovable. They continue to serve as lampposts that underpin anything I talk about when I talk about debate – and they day these two don't hold true anymore, is the day I quit debate without looking back.