The quiet night behind our first debate victory

The first time a Sri Saraswati Vidyapeetham and Shishu Mandir team won an interschool debate, the result occupied three lines in our school magazine. The report named the motion, the winning side and the teacher who had prepared them. It left out the waiting, the misplaced speech papers and the moment a normally quiet student changed the course of the argument.

Those omissions matter because the victory was never simply a contest of vocabulary. It grew from habits formed in primary classrooms: raising a hand, listening to an answer, and treating disagreement as a problem shared with another person. Decades later, its evidence sits in the Spoorthi archive, in recollections from teachers and classmates, and in the continuing life of our alumni community.

A result compressed into three lines

One surviving issue of Spoorthi describes a spring debate against a neighbouring senior school. It records our first interschool title, won by two votes to one on the motion that schools should teach cooperation alongside competition. The judges praised the team's “clear thinking and courtesy”. Anjali, Vasanth, Divya and three classmates represented Shishu Mandir and Sri Saraswati Vidyapeetham. The photograph shows seven students, because the reserve speaker stepped into the picture just as the camera clicked.

The report’s neatness concealed a less orderly evening. There was no digital timer or screen-mounted scoreboard, only a stopwatch, a handwritten sheet and a teacher carrying a red notebook. Before the first speaker was called, Vasanth discovered that his notes had been left on the bus. Anjali lent him a blank page, and the pair rebuilt his strongest point from memory while the opposing team warmed up nearby.

A former teammate remembers travelling home after the event and seeing the city at dusk. In Melbourne, where many alumni now live, a crowded tram and a quick coffee stop can turn an ordinary commute into a reunion. Anjali laughed about this when the group met there years later: the loudest part of their school journey had been the argument, not the applause.

Learning to listen before speaking

The habits behind that result began at Shishu Mandir, where children learned to speak in a circle, finish a story and answer questions without treating a mistake as a reason to withdraw. A later reflection on early learning and character makes this progression easier to see. Reading lessons were paired with routines of greeting, sharing and attentive listening, so participation became a daily practice before it became a competitive skill.

Debate practice turned those habits into a method. Mr Raghavan, who coached the team, asked each student to label an argument with three things: the claim, the evidence and the question still unanswered. He refused to correct a fluent performance until it was accurate. “Speed can hide a hole,” he would say. “A pause lets the class find it.” The team learned to test one another’s reasoning gently, with curiosity rather than contradiction for its own sake.

That preparation changed the mood in the hall. Speakers stopped trying to impress the judges with every sentence and started building an exchange that the audience could follow. The reserve member, Divya, had spent most of her childhood quietly copying the others’ arguments. At one practice, she offered the line that became the team’s final answer: competition and cooperation work best when each is judged by what it makes possible, not by what it defeats.

The exchange that decided the debate

The decisive moment came when the opposing speaker described cooperation as “a soft answer that avoids fair competition”. A pause followed. Vasanth began to respond, but Anjali passed the floor to Divya, risking time and the team’s momentum. Divya accepted the challenge: if the school called cooperation valuable, what did it do when one student learned more quickly than another? She argued that fair competition could expose gaps in teaching, while cooperation could decide how those gaps were addressed.

Divya’s question did not prove every claim on the motion. It reframed the disagreement, allowing both teams to describe a school as a place where standards and kindness had to work together. The judges later said that the answer had “turned an abstract motion into a shared problem”. Looking back, the team had relied on several principles of influence without calling them by those names: reciprocity, commitment and trust earned through visible preparation. The winning feeling came from being understood, rather than overpowering the other side.

The preparation hidden from the record

Victory also depended on work the magazine could not record. Mr Raghavan collected old newspapers, borrowed a cassette recorder and made students transcribe their speeches until they knew them beyond recognition. He timed rehearsals with a kitchen clock, then marked pauses on the transcript. Students tested examples on their families, who were instructed to interrupt as ordinary neighbours rather than supportive audiences. Their blunt questions exposed vague phrases that a friendly classroom might have accepted.

To make the difference between a calculated risk and wishful thinking clear, the class studied a real dealer casino exercise; no money was involved, and the lesson concerned rules, odds and confidence rather than gambling. The same distinction appears in an Australian grocery shop, where prominent signs at Coles and Woolworths can compete for attention while the small print tells a different story. Mr Raghavan used such examples to teach students to ask what evidence sat behind a confident claim.

Why the victory still matters

The win opened doors for the students who followed. Two entered teacher training, one studied law and another built a career in journalism, professions in which the ability to frame a case and answer a difficult question proved useful. The story also helps explain why the alumni network remains valuable today. Its magazine archives, news updates, events and committee contacts keep relationships active long after students leave. Yet preserving memories requires care: the federal Privacy Act 1988 offers a relevant reference for handling personal information, and the consent of former students and families should guide the publication of old photographs and oral histories.

In Sydney, where some of the team now works, Anjali still uses the old exercise when mentoring interns. She asks each person to separate the claim they can support from the claim they merely hope will sound convincing, then invites a colleague to question the difference. Her coaching resembles the old red notebook more than a professional speaking course. At alumni gatherings, the habit creates useful encounters as naturally as a morning ferry across Sydney Harbour, carrying former classmates into conversations about work, leadership and the next community project.

The same instinct appears in the alumni community’s involvement with SanskarKendra centers, where practical support and shared responsibility matter more than a polished display. Former speakers have helped younger students prepare for interviews, while teachers and parents have offered guidance on scholarships and careers. The details differ, yet the pattern endures: people learn to listen closely, make a case honestly and accept that another voice may improve it. Read again, the three lines in Spoorthi become more than a result. They mark the point when our first debate team discovered that winning could mean opening a conversation, and when a school community learned to keep that conversation alive.