How Competition Compromises Culturals

Every year in the autumn semester, long before the first stage light is switched on, IIT campuses across the country begin gearing up for Inter IIT. Culturals, the youngest in the Inter IIT ecosystem, was introduced 8 years ago. Cultivated from a simple idea to give culture, art and expression the same recognition and competitive stature as sports and technology, Inter IIT Culturals has grown into a high-stakes and fiercely contested platform for all 23 IITs. 

Inter IIT was envisioned for individuals who appreciate the same art form to come together, compete on fair and equal grounds, and foster a space of mutual respect, learning and artistic excellence. Each genre is allocated a grand budget for practice, costumes and props. The students, led by the Contingent Leaders and their Genre Captains, start preparing months in advance. Teams are selected through audition, followed by relentless and enduring practice schedules, rehearsals, breakdowns, and breakthroughs to present performances that weigh on the institute’s pride and prestige, as every trophy counts toward a legacy. 

However, as Inter IIT Culturals grew in prestige, the spirit of performances eroded. It has become more important to win at all costs; this principle also advocates pulling other IITs and their performances down rather than ameliorating one’s performances. 

Refresher: 

All IITs send performers to put their best foot forward across 12 genres. Each genre comprises multiple sub-competitions conducted over a span of four days and judged by invited judgesFamous artists of the respective artforms are invited to judge the competitions. Each IIT can suggest judges and then a voting round takes place where all IITs vote for judges in each genre. This mechanism is put in place to eliminate the possibility of judge rigging. who can be voted in by all IITs. In every sub-competition, contingents earn a fixed number of points for podium finishes, which are calibrated to the relative importanceThe total number of points assigned to each sub-competition depends on the relative popularity of that event, the number of people participating and an estimate of the effort that would go into preparing for that sub-competition. For example, group dance has more points assigned to it than slam poetry. and scale of the sub-competition. These points are aggregated to determine the winners of the genre-specific cups, and the cumulative tally across all genres ultimately decides the winner of the overall Inter IIT Culturals Cup.

The nature of cultural competitions is largely subjective, and without proper structure, bias is inevitable. Hence, an Inter IIT Culturals rulebook was created, and amendments are proposed annually, which are discussed and voted into effect by all IITs in ‘rulebook meetings’ held in the lead-up to Inter IIT Culturals. The latest draft is a 96-page document that lays out detailed rules for every sub-competition across all 12 genres. 

The Art of Arguing 

Rules in the rulebook lay down regulations regarding time limits, anonymity, safety, stage clearance, etc. However, no rulebook, regardless of length, can realistically account for every possible scenario or interpretation. As a result, many rules rely on broad or vaguely defined penalty clauses, leaving significant room for discretion. This ambiguity is frequently weaponised during the competition, with IITs filing contentions not necessarily to uphold fairness, but to exploit technical loopholes and extract marginal point advantages. These contentions are discussed in a Contingent Leaders meeting that starts at midnight daily after all the competitions for the day have ended, and each IIT is allowed to send 3 representatives to the meet. 

By the end of Inter IIT Culturals Meet(IICM) 8.0, the number of contentions raised tells its own story: 970 contentions raised in total over a span of 4 days. Even under the generous assumption that each contention takes just 10 minutes to resolve, this amounts to nearly 160 hours of deliberation, far exceeding the total duration of the festival itself. These discussions mark a fundamental shift in how the winner of Inter IIT Culturals is being decided. Increasingly, the real battleground is no longer the stage, the gallery or the dais but the CL meet room.

These meets are also deeply inefficient. Hours are spent debating semantics, timelines, and selectively interpreting clauses in an attempt to circumvent rules rather than uphold their spirit.

A few instances shared by a contingent member in the IITB IICM 8.0 core team are,

“A video taken as proof of one of the music contingents using extra time to tune their equipment was played frame by frame and debated for more than 1.5 hours in the CL meeting, just so that a small penalty could be levied. In another instance, there was a lengthy back-and-forth between 2 contingents on whether an object that was left on the stage after a play was actually a mistake by the team or if it was planted by another contingent to push a penalty.” Most of these discussions rarely conclude and generally end up being aggressive, crude negotiations on how much penalty can be agreed upon to reach a middle ground. Apart from this, the spirit of the performance is also lost in the midst. 

What makes these disputes particularly fraught is the absence of the judge’s opinion in the contention and penalty decisions. CL meets routinely last longer than most actual competitive events, often stretching till dawn.  A genre captain in IICM 8.0 noted, “The timing at which CL meetings are held is often used as an excuse to avoid contacting the judges for any dispute, as CL meetings generally start post midnight. As a result, arguments unfold between CLs, OCs and Genre Captains themselves since a contention has to be closed before moving on to others.” 

Lights, Camera, Prosecution!

An unsaid standard is set that CLs and Genre Captains are chosen based on their ability to debate and argue. Speaking from the experience of a CL, “The spirit of the performance is lost in contention meetings. Last year, after the points awarded to the fashion contingent suggested a 1st place win, discussions regarding the time limit of the performance resurfaced. The lights failed mid-performance, and the model stood poised on stage while they were being fixed. Instead of acknowledging the composure, presence, and professionalism that moment demanded, the debate centred on whether those minutes of silence should be counted as ‘performance time,’ and therefore treated as a violation. Performances are retroactively dissected and reduced to technicalities and procedural loopholes rather than being assessed for the actual art form.” The experience of a multitude of contingent members is tainted as the burden of not just performing, but also defending their performance falls on them. 

It was discovered, upon speaking to the IIT Bombay’s Inter IIT Cultural Coordinator, that IITs send additional contingent members tasked with recording and creating evidence to penalise other teams. He mentioned, “Even when contingents are confident of their performance, we send a group of people to record performances of other IITs to leverage contentions for negotiations.” Contentions are often used to negotiate penalties between IITs. A Genre Captain of the IIT Bombay contingent stated, “We often see IITs mutually deciding to delete proofs against each other as part of a deal that lets them both off the hook.” In many discussions with CLs and Genre Captain through the last years, it was discovered that multiple IITs collude to create a lobby that raises contention in the hopes of imposing a penalty against the leading IIT of that genre. 

In such cases, the performers of the leading IIT are met with extremely detailed scrutiny after the results have been announced. Fine arts contingent members recalled, “In IICM 7.0, in the costume design competition, the costumes were opened, and every nook and cranny was searched to find cause for a penalty after the contingent ranked first and was leading by a huge margin.” Moreover, a member of a past contingent recounted that contingents of other colleges go as far as checking the metadata of each photograph. 

In some cases, the penalties are levied by using the rulebook’s limitations, especially in the lesser-known and technical arts. A member from last year’s Photography contingent stated, “There are a million ways to capture and process photographs, and making rules on exactly which slider you can or can not change in editing becomes a challenge, for example, last year “denoising”Denoising a photo is the process of digitally removing or reducing random, unwanted variations in brightness and color (noise or grain) to improve image quality, clarity, and sharpness, making details more visible without losing important features like edges was not allowed to be done in the post processing workflows without much explanation, this rule was also not stated in the rulebook, leading to confusion and debates amongst the teams.

These rules attempt to manage subjectivity, but at a significant cost: creative freedom. The requirement to submit RAW files, for instance, helps judges separately assess capture and post-processing skill, yet it also restricts the range of equipment that can be used. Many non-traditional devices that do not support RAW formats are excluded before the ideation stage itself, limiting experimentation and innovation.”  

Host or Hostile? 

If imposing penalties in the performance doesn’t yield then other exogenous ways are used, such as planting substances in the opposing contingent’s possession. The home ground IIT often holds unregulated and unstipulated raids in the rooms of contingent members to find incriminating substances, as a cause for disqualification. “I was constantly instructed to check my room by the CLs, even though I knew I did not carry any incriminating substance with me. But they mentioned that it was a precaution,” said a student in IICM 8.0.

Another growing concern within Inter IIT Culturals is the issue of judge rigging, particularly by the host IIT. On paper, the judge selection process appears robust and fair. Judges are collectively suggested by all IITs, contacted by the host IIT’s organising committee, and the available ones are then put up for voting across all IITs. However, despite this seemingly foolproof mechanism, the concentration of power with the host IIT’s organising committee creates room for exploitation. 

Since the organising committee, composed entirely of students of the host IIT, alone control which judges are contacted, how much remuneration is offered and how follow-ups are conducted, there is significant discretion at play. On a few occasions, it has been alleged that this has allowed host IITs to selectively engage with judges who already share a familiarity or rapport with them, while other equally qualified judges are filtered out under the guise of ‘unavailability’.

A genre captain of IICM 8.0 further reaffirmed this regarding the host IIT, IIT Kanpur, “A Google form was floated among all IITs to collect suggestions for judges that can be invited to judge the competitions. We had suggested multiple judges through the Google form; however, none of them actually ended up being in the voting shortlist. When we individually reached out to them after Inter IIT, we got to know that a few of them weren’t contacted, and a few others were given ridiculously low offers, like judging for free and not being given accommodation.”

Such antics by the host IIT aren’t uncommon and were also widely reported in IICM 6.0 hosted by IIT KGP. Unfortunately, this creates an environment of hostility and distrust amongst the attendees and forces them to question if participating is worth it, if their efforts were fruitful, or if they could have alternatively used their time optimally, since the outcomes were pre-decided and the situation was out of their control. 

Even more concerning are instances where this power imbalance extends beyond selection and into influence. There have been cases where host IITs, under the pretext of being the official organising authority, have directly communicated with judges about their own performances. Other contingents have no such access, as the rulebook prohibits any performing members from contacting the judges. This asymmetry fundamentally undermines the idea of neutral adjudication and places the host IIT in a position of unfair advantage. 

Beyond judge selection, host IITs also enjoy a range of operational advantages that further skew competition outcomes. A particularly frequent issue is unequal access to practice venues, especially for performing arts such as dance and theatre. Visiting contingents are often denied proper rehearsal spaces or given suboptimal venues, while the host contingent secures extended practice slots in the exact competition venue. 

An ex-Inter IIT CL further confirmed this, “The host IIT was given extra lighting practice slots, giving them greater freedom to experiment and perfect lighting effects. In our slot, we weren’t allowed to test a lot of lighting effects as many of them were malfunctioning, and the host IIT didn’t allow us to get help from the controller.

Moreover, in events with online submissions like film and photography, there have also been instances where the contingent of the host IIT was allowed to submit entries after official deadlines, even as other IITs are held strictly to the rules. 

Beyond the Scoreboard

Despite the competitive nature of Inter IIT, contingent members should uphold the basic principles of sportsmanship and ethics. However, most participants keep or are forced to keep their morals aside. In IICM 7.0, a performer, from the fashion contingent, whose heel broke moments before the performance, was refused help from other contingents because she was part of the competition. Such acts demean the spirit of sportsmanship and also the months of time and effort that every participant puts into the competition. 

Coupled with the already immense pressure to perform the best, to not make a singular mistake, to receive insufficient breaks and maintain energy despite being tired, these happenings ruin the “Inter IIT experience” for most participants. Months of effort and passion is not being given enough respect to be awarded on merit or, in some cases, awarded a lead but later dragged down because of a rule that is twisted to serve the purpose of an unjust penalty. Junior members of the contingent often end up feeling extremely helpless as they are usually kept in the dark regarding the proceedings in the contention meetings. As a result, a large chunk of first-time Inter IIT participants are frustrated and disappointed as the experience, sold to them as ‘the grandest stage to showcase and appreciate the artform they enjoy’, ends up being a 4-day festival of sabotage, distrust and caution.