Gautham Venkatasubramanian, the Co-ordinator of the English Language Activities Society was sitting at the table at the far end outside FoodKing, scribbling down what was quite probably a math problem. The man is either so devoted to his work or so forgetful of his responsibilities that he’s set his club’s logo as his phone’s wallpaper. His vigorous head-banging made it obvious that he was immersed in the music he was listening to; he was obviously having fun but I had to interrupt him for otherwise this article could not be written (irony, thou art afoot!).

ELAS conducts four events during Oasis – the Oasis Quiz, Theme Quiz, Wordstock and Speed Scrabble. The Oasis Quiz is a general quiz and will be hosted by reputed quiz master Major Chandrakant Nair, affectionately called Captain. The customary Theme Quiz which will be a mythology quiz owing to the Oasis 2016 theme, “Of gods and men” and will be conducted by ex-BITSians. Wordstock is a literary event of word games, comprising of crosswords, anagrams and so on while Speed Scrabble is Scrabble played with a 5 minute time limit played with a chess clock. For this semester, ELAS has also planned a larger number of quizzes and is planning to introduce more JAMs with possibly a Scrabble event independent of the fest.

ELAS’ work includes inviting quiz masters and looking after the logistics for the events. While as a member, the work is basically just attending and publicising the events, the Coordinator and the Joint Co-ordinator have planning duties. The lack of proper funding is a huge constraint in organising the events – ELAS is one of the clubs most affected by Oasis’ financial constraint. Another challenge faced by ELAS is that many quiz masters have clashing schedules with IIT Delhi’s Rendezvous and IIT Kanpur’s Antaragni. In spite of these hurdles, they’ve managed to bring one of the best quiz masters in the country to BITS this Oasis.

By the time he finished explaining all this to me, the Co-ordinator was visibly very tired and emotional; I can’t say whether it’s because he struck upon a difficulty in solving his math problem or whether this change of mood was caused by the thought of all the work he has to complete before Oasis. In any case, I bade him goodbye and good luck and left him alone to his math, music and weird dance moves.