It’s been over a year since I went to the office of the DOSW with a dozen paged proposal for the formation of a new group that fostered linguistic and literary skills among the people on campus. I had called it Logophiles, the love of reason and language.
I had huge hopes for the group. I really felt (and still feel) that the existence of such a group was mandatory in a campus such as ours. But I would be kidding myself if I said that things have gone according to plan in the past year or so. They haven’t. The group hasn’t achieved even a fraction of what I had expected it to.
Part of the fault, of course, lies in my inherent nature of being unrealistically optimistic about anything and everything. In hindsight, a freshmen running a group, attracting numbers in the hundreds and spreading the wisdom of language and the soft sciences was too fantastical a vision.
That said, I have learnt an immense amount about how stuff and people work. I’ve made a huge number of mistakes. I’ve made egregious assumptions and almost unpardonable over-assumptions. But I can say with confidence that I’ve learnt from my immature actions. I have grown.
So, I felt it was about time I actually sat down and wrote a post about all the things that went wrong and how to set it right. Logophiles will be back next semester and will hopefully achieve the more realistic goals that will now be set.
Mistakes
1. The Name
The naming of the group was admittedly a debacle. It was too erudite and I daresay, presumptuous a name for a college group. Almost the entire campus didn’t know what it meant. A huge majority reported that they thought the group had something to do with logo designing.
The biggest problem arose when we conducted our premier event. The poster was minimalist and just had the name of the group. People simply didn’t understand what the event was for and being people didn’t bother to inspect further. A huge chunk of the audience was lost frankly because they didn’t know what the event was about and what relevance it could hold to them.
The name if the group has to be changed. I’ll have to sacrifice novelty for understanding. A bland name will do as long as people know what purpose the group serves.
2. The Illusion of Bureaucracy
Interacting with the people in the administration, I did have a feeling that there was too much bureaucracy and hassle involved in creating a group. The process ought to have been much more smoother.
As a result of such presumptions, I spent the entirety of the second semester in the waiting room of the DOSW and the third waiting for e-mails from the Hobbies Club. The latter expedition turned out to be a huge disaster.
Now, I realize that the time I spent dealing with the bureaucracy was not required at all. It took me a weekend to plan out the first session. The shackles I believed I was chained in were merely an illusion. I’ve learnt that you can’t be chained unless you want to. Yes, deep inside I probably wanted things to take time. Maybe I was too overwhelmed by the entire prospect. Maybe I was procrastinating.
To conduct an event, all I require is permission to book an auditorium. As ours is a registered group, the process in relatively hassle free. Everything else involved is completely independent of the administration.
Next semester, events will be conducted at a far superior frequency. The material will be prepared over the summers. Bureaucracy will no longer be as big a pain in the ass as it might seem to be.
3. Group Structure
Two people cannot run a group. Period. I need to recruit more people with specialized skills. To function, an organization has to have structure. Without structures, the group descends to anarchy.
Also, we will need people across all years. People in Logophiles were predominantly from the second year and this led to our view of the campus being extremely skewed and one dimensional. We require juniors to better understand what the atmosphere in their year is. We need seniors because they know more. They’ve seen more. They’ve experienced more. There is wisdom in age.
A mass recruitment has to be carried out. We need a sizable population of permanent members. Associates will not cut it. Unless people are willing to invest their all in a group, we cannot expect to see favorable results. We need people who are dedicated and more importantly identify themselves with the purpose serve.
4. Mission
I’ve come to realize that Logophile’s mission is too vague for it to work in a certain direction. Throughout our functioning, I have found myself at a loss for what it is that we are actually doing. Are we teaching? Or are we trying to accumulate the erudite on campus?
The group has to have a definitive mission and all its activities must agree with it. A constitution is mandatory. Without it, a group will simply lose its purpose and cease to exist.
5. Audience Targeting
Another debacle we’ve indulged in far too many times is in failing to define the nature of our target audience. As far as the group is concerned, the campus is divided into two factions: people who are fluent in English and the arts, and people who struggle with it. A single event cannot cater to the tastes and sensibilities of both groups simultaneously.
This was a major problem we faced in the premier session. I simply didn’t know who to target the material towards.
Ideally, I would like to bring out material that entices both factions of the audience. But I now understand that it has to be done separately. A beginner’s class in English will hardly be interesting to a person whose done his/her schooling in an English medium school in New Delhi. Similarly, a person from a remote village in Bhiar is more likely to find himself at a loss if he attends an event on the history of Western Philosophy.
There is a gap of understanding between the two groups but it is a gap that can be bridged. Logophiles will have to come up with two sets of contrasting events. But as time and the semester progresses, the gap has to be reduced. Ideally, a person at the end of the semester will find events from both sets interesting and enticing to the mind.
In conclusion, I hope to incorporate all these changes in views into the new constitution and build a group that has a reasonable and achievable mission and has a decent chance at succeeding. Logophiles has been a disappointment to many people. It hasn’t lived up to the hype it created. I’m going to give it my all to ensure that that changes.
The Black Swan 