The Oasis English Press reached out to Samarth Sahu, coordinator of the Poetry Club, for a conversation about the club’s role in the upcoming fest.

Samarth explained that the club would organize four events. There would be two kernel events, Rap Wars, a rap battle event, and Purple Prose, a slam poetry event. The other two events were Chaupal and Conspiring Minds. The former is a Hindi-Urdu talk show, while the latter is a trivia-based game. Besides Oasis, the Poetry Club has a number of events throughout the year such as “Shaam-e-Sukhan” pre-BOSM and “Ibadat-e-Mohabbat” pre-APOGEE. Within the club, they have reading and writing sessions where they recite pieces and encourage constructive criticism.

Coming to the club’s preparations for these events, Samarth said that the club had been conducting preliminary rounds for Purple Prose and Rap Wars since July. The club conducted four preliminary rounds for Rap Wars in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata. However, for Purple Prose the club had preliminary rounds in six cities.

When asked about if they were facing any issues, the coordinator explained that how Chaupal had faced a ‘lack of hype’ last Oasis. They hoped to overcome that and also introduce a musical aspect to it to attract more outstation participants. Samarth also mentioned that the club changed the structure of Rap Wars this time after having been critiqued by the StuCCA and the general public last year. The club reached out to ‘specific organizations’ that specialize in battle events and decided to reduce the number of freestyle rap battle rounds to improve upon that issue. The club has also introduced ‘prepared rap battles’ wherein the rappers will have pre-written lines of their own. 

Samarth touched upon his interactions with the StuCCA, commenting on how smooth they were and thanking them for their effort. Samarth believed that this Oasis would be better as the working batch had experience. He ended by hoping that every BITSian would have a great time during the fest.