The Central Auditorium was occupied up to the first two rows, as people waited patiently for over an hour for the second phase of Stage Play to begin.

 The first college to present their performance was Maharaja Surajmal College, Delhi. Their performance was structured around the lack of awareness regarding the issue of mental health. The performance enraptured the entire audience with its minimalistic use of props. Three men sitting in a park and arguing over the seating arrangement might seem like a trivial conversation to the untrained eye, but the students from Surajmal infused the setting with elements of political satire, as they spoke about how emotional attachment to land has given rise to conflicts in Kashmir, and the Naxalite uprising among certain communities. One of the characters, a self-proclaimed genius, was someone who suffered from hallucinations. He saw visions where he had multiple strange interactions with the same people, in different scenarios. The play also spoke against the idea of making people, especially children, fit into normative societal roles. The play enjoyed great crowd reception.

The next team to enact their play was Ashoka University, who believed that a play is much more than dialogues, thus ensuring that hardly any scene in their play had dialogues that lasted for more than ten seconds. Their play was about pollution, awareness regarding menstruation, village life, dowry, and various other similar issues. The play centred around a young woman, who was fed up with the pretence of urban life, and decided to go and live in a village. Much to her surprise, village life came with its own set of challenges. The play managed to shed light on social taboos associated with topics like menstruation, and how viewing them from a myopic, conservative lens clamps down on the progress of a society. The main theme of the performance was the idea that no change can be executed suddenly, and that being progressive is also a certain kind of privilege. 

Deshbandhu College, the performers of the third play, somehow managed to transport Mohammad Bin Tughlaq from his Durbar to Karan Thapar’s studio, via a police station and a pan shop in rural Kanpur. The Bermuda Triangle, the fate of MH370, why ‘melody is so chocolatey’ and how Tughlaq managed to make his way to the PMO in Jingostan (a fictional country) were the four greatest mysteries that plagued the audience throughout Deshbandhu’s play.  Amongst MeToo puns and random spells of rap, the play highlighted how agrarian distress still plagues the country and our politicians are busy using the struggles of these farmers to garner political capital. The play soon delved into Orwellian levels of dystopia, when it showed how certain irrational decisions by Tughlaq such as changing currency denominations into copper coins and introducing the Ghyasuddin Sultan Tax (GST) led to national outrage, much like the decisions of the original Ghyasuddin (O.G). The play ended with Deshbandhu depicting how modern-day democracies often end up representing the much-hated monarchies that they planned to substitute. This play was met with deafening applause from the Deshbandhu contingent.

The final play of the morning was presented by Amity University, who chose the theme of the Mahabharat and tried to simulate the council of Chitragupta, where the various characters of the Mahabharat were called onto the stand to answer the allegations being levelled against them. One by one, Draupadi, Dronacharya and Karna were called to answer for their actions during their lives. The play mainly focused on how even the righteous warriors in the epic had been a party to acts of favouritism, deception and casteism. Amity also spoke about how people have always been making promises, and then breaking those promises when it suits them. Ending with a heavy monologue, the play left the parting message that good always triumphs over evil.