Since the end of BOSM, Asim Shah, the StuCCAn of The Department of Publications and Correspondence, has been perpetually engaged in conversation over the phone. It was difficult to extract a 15 minute time-window from the busy man. However, once he sat down, he provided detailed insights into the work of his department for Oasis.

Asim says that he has had a scary ride this semester due to his responsibilities. He has tried to follow the footsteps of the former StuCCAn in his approach to manage the plethora of work – correspondence and reprography. In order to increase productivity, he delegated more responsibilities to the first and second year batch as compared to the previous StuCCAns. “Our calling sessions started on the last day of BOSM. We got more than 3000 registrations within the very first week and that is something which has never happened in PCr history”, says Asim.

With a week left for Oasis, about 75% of the work has been completed. The work-load peaks around two to three days before Oasis due to the piling up of queries of the incoming participants. Doubts on registration payment, travel and identity verification need to be continually answered by the members of the Department. Tanmaay Chandak, a second-yearite, says that he has woken up in the middle of the night as he had mistakenly felt his phone on vibrate, and would have missed calls because of it.

Aditi Pandey, a third-yearite, says that the most challenging aspect of the work is to convince participants to register for the lesser known events in Oasis. The work does get repetitive and frustrating at times. Nonetheless, the department takes pride in being the voice of BITS to the outside world.

The Department of PCr was one of the targets of criticism and scrutiny in the recently held BRC. “We got great help by closely observing BOSM and the things that went wrong in it. All of us had a lot of pointers in mind about things to avoid”, says Asim. He hopes that the remaining work of the department goes smoothly.