Serious vs Silly

There are a lot of serious topics expected at EUDC, as Dharani notes, across the nine rounds, “you're likely going to have one on education, family, international politics and two from the region where the tournament is being held that year. This year is in Bulgaria, so you're likely to see a lot of Balkan topics which means you need to study everything from the current politics, all the way into their history.”

But there’s also room for fun in the debate hall. It’s up to the Chief Adjudication Panel to decide what the topics for that year are going to be and Maya points out, “It can be those sorts of serious topics, but it can also be, ‘This House would ban zoos’ which comes to mind.”

“It can be very simple funny things, pulling from movies or cartoons. I once had ‘This House believes that Voldemort should have had a nose'" says Dharani. “It was a good debate because it ended up being about whether or not villains should be humanised on television and how children perceive evil. We’ve also gotten topics on video games and K-pop. So competitive debating can be very funky, but it can also be very serious.”

Maya adds, “There was one when I was in Liverpool along the lines of, ‘You’re a Croatian musician who's representing Croatia in Eurovision and a superpowered AI wrote a really great song for you that has a better chance of winning. Would you use that AI song instead of your own if nobody would find out?’ A topic genuinely can be anything.”

Nurturing confidence

Competitive debating has been a way for the pair to identify their strengths and weaknesses and work on them together to help build confidence. Maya notes, “I still don't think I'm always very confident. One of the reasons I joined debating was to gain that confidence. And it's something that you continually work to improve. As part of our training plan we have a training milestone that we've set for ourselves that only has to do with building confidence.”

Dharani says, “We tend to get rattled when we go up against very good teams or teams with a reputation for having done very well. I think a lot of times we get nervous when we're in rooms where everyone's a man because they are always really loud, they're really in your face and we tend to shy away from that. So part of our training plan is working on pure confidence and it's made a massive difference to how we've been doing - we would shout crazy affirmations at each other.”

“And we'd make sure to let people's compliments go to our heads” said Maya. “We would spend time working on those egos because you need that, especially when you're two women debating in a room full of men. And once we saw that we were able to do that and we improved on that, we saw serious improvement in our positions as well. We made finals, we did better at trials.”

Conquering challenges

Navigating this typically male-dominated arena, Dharani and Maya have persevered through scepticism. “It obviously can be very scary because you're putting yourself out there and it’s a very tough thing to do. Sometimes the men at competitions laugh at you when you're speaking or they speak loudly to each other but it tends to be the teams that are struggling [in the competition]. The more reputable teams are very respectful" says Dharani.

On a hopeful note, Maya highlights the significant increase of female representation in recent years, stating, “Women in debating have increasingly been taking up the space that they deserve. When I was training in Tel Aviv in my first two years of debating, I was able to see (and I was also trained by) some of those women who, maybe a decade ago I wouldn't have seen as many of. I saw the leading Tel Aviv team, who were two women that had English as a second language, making the finals and doing very, very well at World Championships and European Championships. So we do have those people to look up to and we do see women doing better and better and taking up space.”

“We also see respect and acknowledgement from the debating community for the fact that women are to some degree disadvantaged. We know that women's speaker points are on average lower, that women get judged for certain stylistic things that men don't. But the debating community is also very aware of that. So I think that we're slowly correcting that.”

Beyond the debate hall

The impact of debating extends far beyond the competition floor. Dharani and Maya credit debating for enhancing their critical thinking, analytical prowess, and communication skills. 

Maya revealed how her debate training influenced her academic writing for her recent dissertation. “I found myself writing my dissertation and trying to position my research within the critical context. I found myself referring to debate terms and thinking as a debater sometimes rather than a researcher,” she disclosed. “That mindset gave me the clarity about how to make arguments that I was then able to apply to academic writing.”

“I always say that I would have never gotten into Cambridge if I didn't debate” says Dharani. “A lot of the things that came out in my interview, whether we should kill terrorists, whether they should be afforded trials, were things I had talked about before and I had formed opinions on. Or for things I hadn't heard of, I was able to come up with answers on the spot because I'm so used to doing that in debate. It really helped me get into Cambridge and it's the same for job interviews too.

“It all intermingles with what I do across both debate and academia - one always helps the other. I’m constantly saying to Maya, I did this in school today and then I'll use it in debate and the other way around too in a lot of my exams” says Dharani.