i'll believe in anything (the journey to breaking at sofia wudc 2026)
on leaving home and finding it again. on resentment, discipline, and leaps of faith. and on scaffoldings that may never become buildings.
what i talk about when i talk about debating
If anything hints at how much I love debate, it’s that I still remember the first three motions I ever debated. The first was about the ethics of gene editing. The second motion asked whether we should regret the increased cultural significance of baggy jeans. The third was whether India should fund space research instead of fixing poverty. I remember the cases I ran, too, as crude as they seem now. On baggy jeans, I argued that they didn’t even make you look cooler, just like a waddling penguin. That line got a laugh. Apparently, it was enough to win the round.
All of this started in a seemingly unrelated after-school class I loved. It was a haven from the intellectual rot and mindless cruelty that defines the Indian education system—we learnt about Picasso’s Blue Period and Bruce Springsteen’s protest music and engaged in a yearly tradition of re-writing Shakespeare using modern-day slang. We were encouraged to express ourselves: science-fiction thrillers, rom-coms, and plays we acted in horribly, yet with absolute faith that we had captured the spirit of Meryl Streep.
It was also the first environment in which I discovered the thrill of debate.
The five seconds JUST before I start my debate speeches are the absolute worst. But the five minutes that follow are the best. There is a feeling of absolute composure and control. The frantic search for refutation. Words tumbling over each other as I hunt for the cleanest phrasing. And then the moment it lands—the deep, smug, petty, primal satisfaction when the room responds. It’s a feeling I had only ever found elsewhere in sports.
But the second, and more important thing that debate made me do is be forced to consider “the other side” on an almost instinctual level. This obsession with generating both “for” and “against” arguments became the lens through which I saw the world. I generated little cases in my head for their behaviours and actions—and began to see why they did the things they did, in ways I could not fundamentally see before.
Maybe my teachers didn’t deeply hate me, or maybe that friend wasn’t just being an asshole—perhaps there were deeper, underlying things—like upbringings, educational systems, and different ways of thinking that came in the way, and that their actions had to be necessarily interpreted through those lenses. Everything I’m saying right now may seem like just Empathy 101 to an older, emotionally well-adjusted audience, but it’s something that I had to actively cultivate at a young age. Debate gave me the tools to understand the world, the people in it, and the systems that made it up, far before it taught me the intricacies of social justice or International Relations or philosophy.
The thrill of the speech, and the empathy it cultivates—these are the two lampposts that underpin everything I talk about when I talk about debate. The day they stop being true is the day I quit without looking back.
I carried both with me when I moved to Canada.
whoami
I started university four months late—post-COVID Canadian student visa processing delays meant that I couldn’t attend orientation and join Waterloo in the fall like everyone else. I flew in on January 3rd and moved in early on campus, not expecting it to be empty. The silence hit me first. Compared to Mumbai’s constant background noise—traffic, birds, street vendors—it felt unnerving. So did the isolation. Back home, my childhood friends lived within ten minutes of each other. Here, I knew no one.
I remember my first snow. I remember getting lost on the way to the campus Subway because my GPS stopped working. I didn’t know how to pay for food in the cafeteria. But amongst all this, I still remember being desperate to debate—messaging the club's Instagram page about how I could join, and showing up on the first Monday I could, before I ever attended my first university lecture.
I was incredibly desperate to fit in. In high school, I’d debated at the national level in India—a format far more style-and-vibes-based than British Parliamentary (BP)1—and wanted the members of this shiny new debate club in this shiny new Western country to think that I was worthy of being heard too. Embarrassingly enough, this is the very first thing I did when I walked in: found the first person who looked like they were on exec, and introduced myself as a national debate champion. (Yes, I know. Shoot me.)
My first UW Debate meeting was also my first time interacting with Canadian students. Internally, I was incredibly afraid—for the first time in my life, I was different. Even though we spoke the same language, I realised incredibly quickly that I had an accent, that I constructed my sentences differently, and that I had a vastly different frame of reference for understanding the world than everyone else. I remember hearing Canadian accent after Canadian accent in dismay—I’d accepted my offer of admission only after reading online that Waterloo’s undergraduate student body was 22% international students, and I was shocked that everyone around me was Canadian. I would realise only much later that this statistic would really hold only in my math classes, and that most of the international student friends I would make over the next week would struggle to ever make Canadian friends or join student clubs, always feeling like the invisible cultural barrier was too huge to bridge.
I only came back to a second UW debate meeting because Jumanah was at the first one. If she could be Bangladeshi and speak as powerfully as anyone else at the show debate, be the club president, and the club’s most successful debater, then I felt like there was hope for me, too. I anecdotally know of many WGM2 debaters who have come to a second UW debate meeting because we had a WGM at the club fair or leading our meetings.
As I would later progress in my debate career, others would come to occupy this role (BRAC A ‘22, Stanford A ‘24, Tokyo A ‘26, NUS A ‘26) and give me faith that I could carve out space for myself without changing how I sounded.
That’s one version of who I was when I walked into that first meeting. But if I’m being fully honest, it’s incomplete.
I was lucky to be born a straight man in the major metropolitan city of Mumbai to a Hindu family. Both my parents heavily focused on English education, to the point where I am (embarrassingly) significantly more fluent in English than Hindi (which is also why I’ve never even thought about applying for ESL status). Childhood was difficult for other personal reasons, but I was never in want of material needs, let alone coming close to food insecurity. Before getting into debate, I did a total of 17 Model UN competitions in high school, peaking when I had the honour to serve as the Secretary General for my school’s conference.
And that national championship I so clumsily announced at my first meeting? It was at a tournament that more than 1600 schools take part in annually. By the time I got to university, I was no longer my introverted middle school self—I was fairly comfortable in front of a podium and microphone.
Since then, I’ve been able to attend almost every debate tournament I’ve wanted to (outside of visa restrictions) without having to think a lot about money—the money I’ve earned through my internships, plus my mother being gracious enough to sponsor parts of the international trips, has been sufficient to cover my expenses.
Add to this that Alex and I represent a Canadian university—most countries (like India) celebrate even having an open breaking3 team at each WUDC4, while Canada typically has two or three breaking teams. Most importantly, we’re close to the States, which means I can transit in two hours to go to a tournament like Hart House or NAUDC5 and debate some of the best in the world.
All of this ultimately translates into a degree of name recognition amongst American debaters if you do well, and exposure to international judging paradigms at the larger competitions. Over time, shared social spaces appear (like Debate Connections), and you can slowly get access to advice from and spars against better debaters from other circuits. All of this would be unthinkable to someone from the Indian debate circuit.
So: a scared immigrant kid at his first Canadian debate meeting, but also one who had already won a national championship, spoken at 17 MUNs, and would never have to choose between tournament fees and groceries. Both of these were true, and both shaped what came next. You would think all that preparation would have made the path forward straightforward. It was not.
non-chalance
In the two years since my first debate club meeting in January 2023, I enjoyed a spectacularly winding and frankly confusing debate career. I spent the first 8 months claiming to be “busy” and having “missed bid deadlines”, while internally I was simply too cowardly to attend a debate tournament. I was afraid of being at the bottom of tabs6 at a regional Canadian tournament—no longer the exceptional kid from Mumbai who reached finals largely off the back of my ability to say coherent English sentences—exposed for who I really was, and shown my place as an immigrant in the West.
At long last, I overcame this dread and decided to commit to the activity—signing up to attend the Central Novices tournament in Montreal (half as an excuse to travel to a new city). I did reasonably well, reaching the finals in my category.
The year after this was typified by a consistent ability to reach bubble rounds7, followed by an equally consistent inability to win them. HHIV ‘24, Chancellors ‘24, WUDC ‘25, and Ottawa IV ‘25 all followed the same pattern: a strong start, an inability to win in a top room, placement into a bubble where we needed to do well, incredible stress going into that bubble, falling apart and losing it, missing the break, and spending Sunday afternoon revenge tourisming in whatever fuckass Canadian city I found myself in, trying to convince myself that I had at least gotten some value out of the activity.
But somewhere along the way, debate friends became friends, and I realized I could hang out with them outside of tournament settings. The Canadian cities started looking the same, and the resentment of not doing well enough or improving started to overcome the novelty of the activity. But the strange thing is that I never did anything about this—I went to the 2 spars8 the club always did the week before a competition, but never with any specific goals. I wrote down the feedback that my judges gave me, but never asked any follow-up questions or synthesized them into a consistent narrative about how I could improve. The speaker points9 pictured above should reflect this malaise pretty clearly: if I improved at all, it was incredibly glacial.
Looking back, it’s hard to see this as purely an individual failure. There are broader, circuit-wide attitudes in Canadian debating that quietly discourage ambition: a suspicion of “tryharding,” a sense that taking the activity too seriously is cringe, and an anxiety that excessive competitiveness will make debate feel exclusionary to newer debaters. Debate is an activity with no obvious monetary or career payoff, which makes the time investment feel self-indulgent; combined with the fact that it’s “nerdy,” this creates a culture where people often pre-emptively mock or downplay seriousness as a way of managing perception. The result is a strange equilibrium where many debaters spend enormous amounts of time at tournaments week after week, while simultaneously pretending not to care very much about doing well.
On resources, the big one is that it always seemed unclear how best to improve. I spent about a year in university debate not knowing what a burden was, that they had to be comparative, not realising that judges weren’t robots that would meticulously track everything I said, or that most competitive debaters had matterfiles10 they brought along to major tournaments. Waterloo never had a coach or a dino that was globally competitive (our last WUDC break was in 1991), and so as a novice debater, all I had were slideshows from the VPs of training. Online spars were a distant idea— they seemed reserved to me for people who already had connections in the HS circuit or other clubs. And the direct implication of seeing no clear path to improve is that I then felt even less incentivized to try harder—perhaps I was just not destined to make it, and those who consistently top-tabbed tournaments were made of the kind of magic pixie dust I couldn’t even begin to access.
This intensifies at a school like Waterloo, as Alex describes in his Facebook post:
“Jaleelah coined the term “Waterloo syndrome” to describe our debate club’s inexplicable inferiority complex and lack of ambition in comparison to other institutions. Tryharding in Waterloo Debate is often discouraged as being cringe: time spent matterfiling or training trades off with our STEM school’s world-renowned career-centred culture, which tells us to grind LeetCode or study harder. So for a while, I was content with being mediocre at debate. I wanted to not live up to my potential, because that meant I had potential.”
P.S. for a far clearer diagnostic of problems within Canadian debating that I neither have the experience nor vantage point to write, read this excellent piece from Jaleelah: How to fix Canadian debating
But I’ve complained enough about structural problems: it’s time to be honest with myself. The truth is also that I lacked the self-belief to invest in myself and the discipline to use the time I was dedicating to debate well. Tournament after tournament, I was so afraid of feeling any resentment whatsoever towards debate that I convinced myself that I was in it for a purer love of the activity, and that somehow trying to optimise for winning diluted that purity. Or that the external problems, like some unspecified clout bias or accent bias was far too much to overcome, and that it was better to not try hard instead!
But you can’t negotiate yourself out of resentment. Love and meaning are like flowers; they require care and intentionality to flourish. Resentment and hate, on the other hand, are like parasites: sticky and stubborn, carving their way into the deepest annals of your brain, gouging themselves on any morsel of evidence they can find to feed their confirmation bias.
By Winter 2025, the parasite had taken control. I wanted to win or quit. I just didn’t know it yet.
two leaps of faith
There was one thing that should’ve quelled the Waterloo syndrome, which is that, for most of 2024, even as the rest of the club floundered, Alex and Guo flourished—reaching HHIV semi-finals, Chancellors finals, Guindon semi-finals, and racking up many impressive wins along the way. So when the opportunity arose to partner with Alex for the WUDC 2026 prep season, I knew I had to take it.
I would never admit this to Alex directly, so he will find out along with the rest of you through this blog post: this was a rather difficult decision for me. I have no qualms admitting the reasons for this: the first is that he was quite clearly better at this than I was, which is not something I was used to. I’m used to being the person who carries the group project, plans and books the itinerary, and takes control. The second is that he was (at least at the time) clearly far more invested in this than I was—a natural function of having started BP debate in grade 8. So the very act of accepting this partnership, even if originally only for NAUDC, was for me a very serious commitment to myself. It meant that I would have to up my game if I wanted to contribute to the team. I would have to work hard and give a shit.
What made it a lot easier: Alex and I were just starting to become good friends in the winter of ’25. Many weekends spent on debate, which we recompensed for with study sessions: in DP, in E7, at Coffee Brick. Looking back, that term lacks definition entirely—it’s chaos and absentmindedness and an unsuccessful attempt at a balancing act between debate and school, Ananya’s last term at the club so we were all sad she was leaving, and a sleep schedule that meant I would be happy if I woke up in the “am” part of the day, as opposed to the “pm” part of the day.
Alex was a reassuring presence through the chaos: partly because he was going through most of the same chaos himself, which meant I wasn’t alone in the fight. But this cross-applied into our debate partnership: “Waterloo A”, or “AFC Parkdale”, or “Dhoni and Ohtani”, or “Still waiting for the 504 Streetcar” was always a team. Infighting and quiet resentment destroy a lot of teams (I have seen this happen quite publicly at Worlds), and this was not going to be us. No bad speech is ever an individual debater’s fault: it almost always reflects a deeper failure beforehand—either in the 15 minutes of prep before the round, or the weeks of prep season before. There should be no shame in being outspoken by your debate partner, or having to ask them for help with a mechanism, or having them help respond to a team if you are overwhelmed as a whip speaker.
But flip this: in most instances, in the early stages of a debate partnership, you are the sum of your abilities, or perhaps a little bit less than that—adjusting to each other’s prep schedules and in-round communication styles can erode the ability of your team as a whole to function. But over time, you are meant to develop into something much, much greater than the sum of your abilities. The trust in each other’s abilities is meant to grow. The words required to communicate the same idea are meant to reduce. And ultimately, your own abilities are meant to grow: you want to contribute more to the team, you want to do more spars and matter file that one extra Economist article—because you know your team-mate is out there, definitely working hard. The second worst thing after infighting is a collective action problem of giving a shit.
The fact that I could see both evidence of our good teamwork and growing friendship made the first leap of faith a lot easier.
Sadly, NAUDC did not go as planned: despite a few promising individual rounds, we couldn’t hold our own in the difficult top rooms where it mattered most, and collected two fours11 that I still remember to this day with infuriating clarity. We ended on 11 points, failing to break at our first competition as a team.
Not breaking was absolutely heartbreaking for us: We knew we could’ve done better, that the rounds we lost were incredibly close, and by Round 7, intuiting that I was in a “dead” room, I had almost given up. The sense of deja vu, of trying but failing again, of being at a “real” debate tournament but not breaking again, was just crushing—and I couldn’t see beyond it. I stared out of the window for most of the round, my brain foggy, unable to come up with a response or understand a case even if I tried. I can accept losing, but I cannot accept not trying. I spoke a 78, and we took a 2, but I will maintain that this was the worst debate round of my entire life.
And WUDC trials were looming. Old team combinations were reshuffling at Waterloo this year, and we had to make a decision very quickly: would we continue to be a team, would we bid for WUDC, would we continue to debate at all? NAUDC was supposed to break the cycle—proof that trying hard could bear fruit, that Waterloo syndrome was conquerable. Instead, it had threatened to confirm everything I’d feared. After the break announcements, nothing had ever seemed as unclear.
In the midst of all this confusion and despair, we figured we’d go find our judge from Round 6, where we’d taken a four, and get some value out of it at the very least. I knew Ayal gave a shit and would give us good feedback. He’d judged me at McGill IV just a couple of months ago (the first competition I’d broken at in over a year), and had given us about an hour of incredibly passionate feedback then. His bluntness had stuck with me: that we didn’t know anything about the world, that not many teams around the world (like those from Israel, or the Asian and African circuits) got the opportunity to even attend the tournaments we did, and that it was about time we started paying our dues and taking our shots seriously.
When Ayal started talking to us at NAUDC break night, the music was incredibly loud, the drinks were flowing, and the entire venue was packed. By the time he was done, about two hours later, everyone had left, the bar had closed, and the music had faded out.
This feedback session hit far closer to the roots of what was wrong with our team. It wasn’t that we weren’t good debaters or that we were missing a key insight or skill set on a particular speaker position that would unlock great success for us. Instead, it mirrored what I felt while watching debate seminar after debate seminar—feeling like I knew almost everything they were talking about, but just wished I could execute it all consistently every speech.
If you zoom back, debate is an absurdly convoluted activity. First, you have to see a motion and organize multiple approaches to it in 15 minutes, track what other (also incredibly talented and fast-speaking) debaters are saying, update your own case live so that it’s still winning, remember responses to the other teams, collaborate with and help your partner, and make sure to ask POIs. Second, you have to package all of that abstract brain work into a coherent 7-minute speech, and deliver it with as much clarity as a professor and passion as an activist.
This means that after the easy gains in your novice year—learning basic debate theory and stock arguments—improving comes down to execution. If you’re able to isolate variables, work on each of them, and improve even slightly at each of them, you don’t just benefit in that one area of debate—you get a direct, systems-wide improvement that reverberates positively across the rest of your debate performance. A good prep season and high trust with your partner leads to better prep times. Better prep times mean clearer round conception, which directly means an easier time picking extensions on back half, or a clearer first speech in front half. A clearer round conception means an easier time communicating between speeches with your partner and an easier time responding. All of this means better speeches, which means more points and more speaks. More winning.
This meant two big changes for us as a team. First, we needed to view debate more holistically: prep schedules, proactive matterfiling, specific drills—not just “why couldn’t I think of this response in this round?” But secondly, that the vastly expanded scope meant more discipline: we had to be meticulous about self-reflecting after rounds, tracking and isolating variables, and making sure we improved over time.
The last thing Ayal told us was that he believed in us. That we had the raw skill and talent to break at WUDC if we tried, but only if we tried. On the walk back, Alex and I talked about how we’d both promised ourselves that debate was the one thing we would never give up on, and that quitting now would mean admitting that we’d folded the moment it stopped being easy.
And thus I took a second leap of faith.
set the tone
Our WUDC prep season began almost immediately after NAUDC.
In the months that followed, debate in one shape or another was an almost daily part of our lives. I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard, this consistently, at any other goal in my life. And the best part is almost cliché—it’s that it stopped feeling like work. The process of matterfiling itself became a privilege: never before in my life had I been given such an excuse to read so widely and deeply about whatever captured my curiosity, or felt this driven to forage for ideas and shape them into something coherent. We sparred with friends across North America on a growing Discord server (shoutout Debate Connections!), enjoying every round. Every so often, we’d set up long calls to walk each other through what we’d matterfiled—part accountability, part revision, and a quiet boost to retention.
Alex was working in person 3 days a week, and would often crash overnight at my apartment in Toronto. This meant we could go to U of T’s summer practices (along with our friend Elaine), which meant at least access to in-person debate again! But also that we could friendship-maxx—watching movies at the TIFF Lightbox, having momos at the Toronto-famous Loga’s Corner, kicking a football around, or watching a Leafs playoff screening at Scotiabank Arena.
It was definitely all a little chaotic, but I think what kept me going was the momentum—after a week or two, debate practice stopped feeling like an extra obligation I had to fulfill, but rather what I expected to do after I got home. And as it continued to be fun and rewarding because we saw our performances improve, it became the thing I looked forward to doing after I got home. The virtuous cycle, finally spinning in the right direction.
Of course, none of this could have happened without the global debating community: Tarun and the WUDC Fellowship, Adam and Matt’s mentorship, helpful judges who gave us far more time than we were owed in feedback, collaborating with Jaleelah and Rose, or our CUSID prep partners (Vijay + Eve, Sherry + Andrew)—the village Alex describes in his post was real, and we leaned on it constantly.
The results of all of this work were immediate. Before NAUDC, I’d only broken at 2 out of my last 9 competitions. Of the next 7 tournaments I took part in after NAUDC, I broke at 6, and reserve broke at the 7th one.
The 8th tournament I did after NAUDC was WUDC.
we used to pray for times like this
The draw for Round 9 at WUDC took absolutely forever to release. I don’t begrudge the CAs12 for this; these are probably the most important panel allocations made in all of debate the entire year. We’d found a quiet corner in the K-Wing of the University, far away from almost everyone else.
I remember only two things about that wait. The first was a quiet resolve to empty myself completely—to prep as hard as I knew how, to speak with precision, to leave nothing unsaid and nothing unspent. I was convinced we could do it. I kept replaying the bubbles we’d already fought through since the summer: Zagreb Pre-EUDC, Ottawa Open, HHIV, Princeton IV, Vienna Pre-WUDC. This was familiar terrain. This was what we did. There was no reason it couldn’t happen again.
The second was hearing I’ll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade on repeat the entire time—a song I’d picked up from social media’s new darling TV show, and my latest obsession, Heated Rivalry. I remember wryly thinking that I really would believe in anything to win that bubble.
Breaking 48th is a unique form of torture, but one that I’d gladly go through again. After Round 9, we finally looked at the backtab13, and because it felt like we’d taken a 2 in the bubble, we knew it would come down to speaks. Any break announcement stretches time, but WUDC is uniquely agonizing: five slides of breaking adjudicators; a full list of EFL breaking teams; another long list of ESL teams;14 and only then, at last, the open break—48 teams15.
You first get through the top 20 or so teams—these are typically teams that have been at the top of tabs all tournament, and some of them probably broke even before going into the last round. Absolutely no one is surprised. Polite applause ensues.
And then you get into the meat of the break announcement—where things can start to go terribly right or wrong for you. I remember last year, seeing the names of both teams in my bubble round go through, which sealed our fate rather early—it would be mathematically impossible for us to break.
There was a brief respite in this last stretch: our friends Vijay and Eve from McGill broke 32nd! We joined the celebrations, jumping and screaming, but our thoughts quickly returned to our own fate, which remained to be determined. We saw OG16 from our bubble going through, sealing the fact that we had definitely taken a 2 at best—it would come down to speaks.
By the time the teams on 17 points rolled around, we were at breaking team #41. Alex and I had internally given up at this stage, trying to manage our emotions in the increasingly likely case that we wouldn’t make it. 41, 42, 43 … all crept by at a rate so slow it seemed almost personal. By #46, I had started looking at transit routes back: I didn’t want to stick around at the venue for the eventual parade of consolatory hugs and “you’ll get ‘em next year!”, and “it was still a great run!”. By #47, I wanted the ground I was standing on to collapse in on itself Mr. Beast-style, so that I could be buried underground, never having to face anyone ever again.
It is all an absolute blur. Confusion, because I hadn’t heard our own team name in all the noise that had followed, disbelief at being the last team to sneak in, the sense of touching destiny, awe at how oddly perfect the story was, but mostly elation. Sheer euphoria and elation. Yelling, screaming, losing my voice. Hugging and being hugged. Being overjoyed and partaking in everyone else’s joy for us. Being on the edge of tears the entire time. Not being able to breathe. Hugging Andrew and Sherry and Vijay and Eve. Wanting to cry again, seeing how happy the contingent was for us, at how happy we were to be the ones to break the 35 year-long dry spell for Waterloo. Running around, finding (and congratulating) the other team from our bubble room (shoutout Victor and Mira), our mentor Tarun, and messaging my family and girlfriend and friends not in debate, and all our other online debate mentors, my phone notifications devolving into an incoherent jumble of the words “CONGRATULATIONS” and “MY GOATS” and a slew of celebratory emojis.
no alternatives
Two days after breaking at WUDC, at the closing ceremonies, I took a group photo with the rest of CUSID17, all of us smiling beneath a Canadian flag. I am folded easily into the image: a Canadian debater. But I am still Indian. The alternative offers little clarity. I have no real place in the Indian contingent, know almost none of them, and do not belong there either. A week later, a stranger asks our tourist group where we are from. Someone answers, quickly, “Canada.” Again, the answer is true and incomplete. Correcting it would mean inviting a different kind of attention, and I am unwilling to risk the quiet possibility of racism for the sake of precision.
Even as the euphoria of breaking fades, the tension of identity lives on—in quiet moments like these that pass fleetingly to others.
Or in private moments, like at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, when a group of white Dutch kids huddled together to my left seemed to find a huge painting depicting the enslavement of my ancestors particularly funny. The alternative was still insufficient—they’re kids, and I wasn’t about to go explain to them why what they were doing was particularly inappropriate. I can only hope the Dutch school system, their parents, the Internet, or growing up and making their first non-white friend will ensure they learn better. Some hope, but mostly quiet resignation. Shackled by no alternatives.
At other times, this tension is a lot more tangible. Like when the club votes to fund a contingent to Yale IV or NAUDC, and I quietly vote yes for the greater good, knowing I can never access these funds. Or when we booked tickets to go to Panama, and I had a completely different route from the rest of the contingent because I couldn’t fly through the USA. On the way back, I couldn’t say goodbye to anyone because my flight was on a different terminal—cut to me dragging my suitcase across to the other terminal in the scorching sun for what ended up being at least 30 minutes, never sure about whether I was heading in the right direction because I didn’t know Spanish and my blue GPS dot was letting me down. Or the one time in Montreal and the other time in Halifax, I couldn’t get into a bar because I made the reasonable decision to not carry my passport on my person (the process to get an Indian passport replaced is notoriously difficult) and had to walk back to the shared contingent accommodation alone.
In the most personally aggravating instances, it can look like letting my judgment in debate rounds be tampered with. I can slowly see the time splits and burden structure fade away into an amorphous blob of self-righteous indignation—my new goal to systematically correct all the lies that were said in the last 5 speeches, as if my incoherent tirade will as much as put a dent in years of quiet ignorance.
This feeling isn’t new. In my Round 9 bubble at the last WUDC, teams who knew less about India won the room (rightfully so). That was the moment I understood the problem: that truth, on its own, carries no competitive weight. Debate is a game. But it’s unclear to me that this is always a good thing. We build these ornate intellectual frameworks to analyze oppression and injustice, to play with ideas like we’re designing the scaffolding for a better world. But does this scaffolding ever become a building? The question nags at me. Sometimes it feels like we’re practicing cleverness for its own sake, turning lived struggles into abstractions to pass as polished arguments or a well-phrased thesis.
This behavior plays out through the tournament—in Round 1, a team claims confidently that “shit schools” in “shit countries” are fucked either way, and suggests that they don’t matter at all in this debate. I’m complicit too—when it’s my turn to talk about Latin America in the La Mano Dura round, I generalize crudely in a desperate attempt to win the round—reducing a complex issue to all the crime, gangs, corruption, drugs, and authoritarianism Western media already loves to talk about. The semi-final round on invading Sudan is particularly chilling, as I watch debaters I deeply admire talk about genocide and death and Gaza and the SAF and RSF as if none of it were real at all. The brutality of bullets and blood gets beautifully swept under the force of their eloquence, their pretend earnestness, and the shocked awe of the audience at their skill. I am no better—if I were in that room, I would have done the same. They’re no different from me; they’re likely left-leaning and self-aware about all of this, too. They’re just sufficiently better at debate than I am to be in a recorded round that is being live-streamed.
To be clear, none of these moments matter very much on their own. I can afford to lose a debate round, or listen to just one more generalisation about South Asia, or take a longer route through an airport, or miss a drink with friends. What corrodes instead is the accumulation—the way these incidents stack into a low-grade, persistent injury. I arrived in Canada just as immigration hardened into a political fault line, and with it came a sharp rise in casual, defensible racism toward Indians, both online and offline. At the same time, I learned that there are strict limits to what explanation or good faith can repair: I cannot argue my way into a visa or contextualise colonial history to a group of laughing schoolchildren. The harm is not that these frictions exist, but that they demand constant calibration—when to speak, when to stay quiet, when precision costs more than it gives. That quiet resignation is what lingers—the knowledge that this tension is not an aberration, but a condition I will keep negotiating, indefinitely.
And yet.
I broke at WUDC. Waterloo A broke at WUDC. A kid from Mumbai who showed up four months late, who was too scared to attend a tournament for eight months, who convinced himself he was destined to fail, who let resentment fester instead of trying, broke 48th at the World Universities Debating Championship.
That tension will never die. But neither will this.
Which brings me back to Jumanah.
For anyone reading this who has any power over a debate club, representation matters. I know you intellectually understand this, but there’s a high chance you’ve never felt its power if you’re not a stark minority in your debating society—and an even higher chance you’re still unwilling to do something about it after reading this post. The debating circuit, especially in the West, is poorer for this—think about the talent, ideas, and communities we lose every year because we do not select our exec teams, leads of training, and public-facing members with care. Heck, maybe there is even a world in which a developing-country motion does not send debaters slamming the corruption–poverty–weak institutions stock-argument panic button.
And maybe someday, someone else, who is perfectly capable of leading your club, breaking at WUDC, or hosting your socials, will come back because they saw you. None of us does this alone.
it takes a village
Alex has already thanked most of the people I wanted to thank, and I’ve been yapping for long enough here. So here’s my final set of messages.
First, to my mom, always believing in me, for funding me, for supporting me, for tolerating everything. I do everything I do to make you proud.
To Sarah, our relationship is still arguably the most important thing I’ve gotten from debate. I am hopelessly smitten by you; you make me happy, and you make me want to be a better person.
To Mrigaanka, for being my first debate partner, for starting a high school debate club with me, and for being my fellow national debate champion. For being where it all started.
To all of my friends: I’m sorry for not listing all of you out like you deserve. Thank you for tolerating my weekend trips, rescheduling plans so I could still be there, and not losing your shit when I had to cut a hangout short because of debate practice or because a spar had a free slot and Alex and I wanted to try something out.
To UW Debate, carry the torch forward, let this be proof that it can be done, that trying hard can bring meaning. Let the next break not take another 35 years; let it be in Ottawa. To my friends in the club—Taira, Elaine, Nyx, Acon, Guo, Ananya (we miss you!), Ted, Alice, and everyone else, you’re why I could do any of this at all. I came to this club not knowing the rules of BP or having any friends, and I’m going to leave with memories that will be impossible to forget, and friends that I hope will last a really, really long time.
To CUSID, let us be proof of a circuit that will never die—of proof that Helen Wu’s “The Great Churn” will keep us in good health. But also of proof that success as a circuit doesn’t come as a given, that we have to challenge ourselves to be globally competitive, update our judging metrics, and be rigorous with burdens. That it takes very active effort and we need to take ourselves seriously as a circuit.
I’ve long maintained that most “friends” people claim to have within the circuit barely pass the bar of acquaintanceship. But CUSID, I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. A kind face, a supportive pat on the back, or even a shared laugh in a fleeting moment can mean the world at a tournament like WUDC. Communities, especially those the size of a national debate circuit, don’t have to be built on deep, lifelong connections to matter (even though they exist). Sometimes, they’re about shared experiences, mutual understanding, and the small gestures that remind you you’re not alone. For a moment—whether it’s during a quick chat after a round or laughing together at White Elephant—I truly felt like part of something bigger than myself. And that’s worth holding onto, even if it’s fleeting.
And lastly, to the global debating community, all of this only runs because of the quiet labor of hundreds of hardworking, kind, brilliant university students who do this activity for the same reason as me—because they love thinking, curiosity, and looking at the world in different ways. You are the unseen hands that keep the globe turning, the patient force that keeps the wheels from grinding to a halt. Thank you for sustaining this strange, beautiful activity. We cannot wait to welcome you next year, a little closer to home, in Ottawa.
(Maybe it doesn’t matter if debate isn’t a big commercial activity with career prospects, it just matters that we all care. Maybe it doesn’t matter if only 5 people ever read the blog post, because I knew I had to write it regardless. Maybe every scaffolding doesn’t have to become a building.)
The dominant competitive debate format globally. Four two-person teams compete in each round: Opening Government, Opening Opposition, Closing Government, and Closing Opposition. Teams are ranked 1st through 4th, with corresponding points (3, 2, 1, 0).
Women and Gender Minorities
To “break” means to qualify for the elimination rounds of a tournament. Most BP tournaments have preliminary rounds where teams accumulate points, after which the top teams (often 16, 32, or 48) advance to single-elimination “out-rounds.”
World Universities Debating Championship—the largest and most prestigious annual BP debate tournament, hosted by a different country each year.
North American Universities Debating Championship
“Tabs” is a software that tracks team standings, speaker scores, and round results throughout a tournament.
A “bubble round” is typically the final preliminary round, where teams on the edge of breaking need a strong result to qualify. High-pressure, high-stakes.
For some reason, practice debate rounds are called “spars” in North America. Very spooky.
Judges assign individual speaker scores (typically 69–82). When teams are tied on points, speaker scores serve as tiebreakers.
Pre-prepared research documents containing arguments, examples, statistics, and case structures on common debate topics (economics, international relations, philosophy, etc.).
Placing 4th (last) in a BP round, earning zero points. Deeply demoralizing.
Chief Adjudicators—the panel responsible for setting motions, allocating judges, and overseeing the tournament’s intellectual standards.
Most tournaments have the last few rounds closed, which means the results aren’t known until after break announcements. However, room allocations continue to be done on the basis of their points. A backtab tries to use these strength-based draw allocations to reverse-engineer the outcomes of previous rounds.
English as a Foreign Language and English as a Second Language—separate break categories recognizing teams who debate in a non-native language, with distinct eligibility criteria.
The main, unrestricted break category—it is typically the dream of most university debaters to “open break” at WUDC.
Opening Government, i.e., another team in our last round
Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate
I just stumbled upon this - what a beautiful read. Wherever life takes you, I hope you continue to build scaffolds out of rubble.
What an incredible run. Congratulations, truly. I enjoyed reading the backstory