INTERVIEW OF AZMIR( FOUNDER OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYMBOLIC DEBATE SOCIETY)!!!

THE SYMBOLIC DEBATE SOCIETY INSTA

Hi Azmir, First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to join us today. Thank you for having me, so honored to be here.

And to begin with, we'd like you to give our audience a little introduction about yourself about who you are, what you do and where you come from. So please go ahead. Hi, guys. My name is Azmir. I'm 16 years old. I am a junior in high school, currently. And I am the president and founder of the Symbolic Debate Society. I have a certain passion for debating and public speaking, as you all know. And it caused me to create a foundation strictly dedicated to public speaking and debating as a whole. Very well. So the International Symbolic Debate Society, which is founded by you with the vision of imparting debating skills to general public, how would you come up with the name of your society? Like, is there any special reason behind it? Well, it's gonna sound sort of cheesy. But, I watched a movie and I was thinking about a debate society name, I was thinking about what I have to think of a name. It doesn't have to; it shouldn't be like very generic. Something like the National, nah I didn't want something like that. I wanted something unique, something special. And I was watching a movie and the guy literally said something like, "this is symbolically unprecedented". And that triggered something in my mind; I was like the symbolic debate society. And I thought that sounded good. And I asked some of my friends, who helped me start the foundation. And they said, it was a good idea. So that's how we came up with it. Nice!! So an execution always starts with a small move. So what was your inspiration for the creation of the International Symbolic Debate Society? Honestly, I was just very bored. I was very, very bored throughout lockdown. And I missed debating a lot. I missed Model UN, and I missed going out and seeing people that I know, and debating with them, speaking with them. And it caused me to like want to really, really, really have these debates. And I realized that like, online classes, school was being held through the internet. And does that mean that we can now hold debates to the internet? And that caused me to go organize these debates and try to make something out of our free time, you know? So that's how, that's the inspiration. Yeah. So due to COVID right now, as you said, everything is done online. So could you please like, let us know how you are handling this situation and how COVID has impacted the society? Well, COVID was probably the reason why we started it, first of all. So, without COVID-19; obviously COVID-19 affected the world. It was a very, very tragic laminate. And obviously had a very, very impactful way on thinking a way of how we walk, how we breathe, how we do everything on our day to day lives now. But, I feel that COVID had a sort of importance in uniting us as people, as debaters. Without COVID-19, without the forceful time that we're brought into due to COVID, we wouldn't have the society that we have currently or anything. And currently, we're working on bringing the society into real schools now. My school has actually partnered up with me. In the future you’ll see on our social media that we are partnering up with schools now. So that's, that's a really big step that we're taking. Oh, yeah, that's, that's really impressive, like the high school that you are studying in has now partnered up with you. Thank you. So, besides International Symbolic Debate Society, can you please enlighten us with some other projects you have worked on? Honestly I don't work on projects, specifically. I'm not very much of a passionate project maker or anything. I like to devote my time to one thing specially. But, other than this, I'm also an avid tennis player. And I also enjoy international relations, a lot of our topics that you noticed in the debate side that we choose to debate on our international relations issues. So like we have an MUN today, like literally right after this. And the topic for the Model UN is the Afghanistan issue, something that just happened in our world. So we're trying to educate our delegates, we are trying to educate our students on what's going on in the world. I feel that it's very important to me, as international relations is a very, very important topic. A lot of people might not be interested in what's going on in the world. However, I feel that nowadays teenagers, millennials, or Gen Z, They all should be interconnected with what's going on the world because eventually it's going to be our world. Yeah, exactly. That is very true. So yeah, basically a society requires effort, but maintaining and dealing with the hardships and struggle which goes through it comes the bravery and strength. Azmir, what was that one setback you faced during the time which impacted the society. Honestly, At the start we didn't have a lot of members. Like we had a lot of members, I got around 50 people to join in our servers. And the thing was that we had 50 people, but only like three showed up for the debates, like we organize these debates, and only like three showed up. And it was really, really hard on me, because I really, really cared about our attendance. Obviously, we have a Discord server. We like when people talk in our Discord server, we like people being friends. However, if nobody shows up to our debates, it's very, very useless, obviously. And fortunately, we were able to overcome this with a strategy. We've recognized that a lot of our students, a lot of our delegates, a lot of our debaters they don't read our announcements, okay? Just because they don't have the time to go into the server and read the nonsense. So we decided to make an Instagram page. We were going to make an Instagram page anyways. But it kind of like moved up the cycle if you get what I mean. And then we also decided to individually email each person in society just so that they're alerted that there's a debate coming up soon. And, another problem that we faced was enlightening. What I mean by this is, I really, really wanted the society to reach heights on the first go, which wasn't a good plan, honestly. And that causes, like, have a lot of members but no council, no official, you know like an official body that was supposed to operate this society, because of that everything was very unorganized. And I apologize to any of the past members like the older members that are reading this or going through this, but our society was very, very unmanageable. We did not have anybody to look over things, or any specific tasks given to people. And because of that, we were very unorganized. But right now, luckily, I have a talented set of individuals, if I may say that they're more talented than I am. But they are very, very smart, very, very cunning. And so I'm very lucky to have them. And they make everything a lot easier for me now. That's really amazing. When you get a good team, it makes everything easier. So yeah. So the goal of your society is to help members become better debaters. So how did you manage to balance the society along with your Academics and other important stuff? Well, academics are a very valuable thing for me. I care a lot about my academics. They matter more to me than a lot of things, including emotional side of my life. I really, really care about my academics. Throughout COVID, as you all know, academics have been very, very stressful for a lot of students. And especially for me, I couldn't properly learn due to COVID. But I had, I'm an O-level student currently. And we had our exams in May, June. And I live in Pakistan. And our exams were supposed to happen, we studied for that and everything and, then they got cancelled. That've been cancelled around three or four times now. And we haven't gotten our grades, and I have to give them around next month now. And this has been a very stressful time for everybody. But academics are a very, very important thing to me. So I like to keep the society a little down, when I'm academically pressurized. And again, because of my council, I'm able to do that, before I wasn't. I have a debateToday, even though I have an exam in a month, really, really important board exams, I don't really have to focus that much on planning the entire debate now or getting delegates. I just have to sort of just manage the debate. That's literally all I've to do. Yeah, that is good. So it is said that the International Symbolic Debate Society has three branches, an Indian branch, Mexican branch and a General branch for everyone. So please let us know how do you maintain all the three branches simultaneously? Now, the three batches that we have are very complex in terms of the students or the debaters there. They're, for example, in Mexico, the debates that happen in Mexican are Spanish; I don't even understand that, okay, what's going on? I have a friend. Basically how we started the entire operation was, I knew, I couldn't do this by myself, I recognized that I couldn't raise a population of debaters myself. And, you know, go to India, go to Mexico, when I'm just a teenager from Pakistan, who just goes to small time model UN`s in Pakistan. I decided to reach out to a couple friends that I know personally, they're really, really good friends. One of them lives in Mexico, a couple of them live in India. I was like, and to be honest, all of us were very bored, and I really needed this to go through. So I begged them to like help me get it through, you know. I literally begged them. And when I begged them, I officially convinced them to go forward with it. We eventually, you know, combined our efforts, and we went forward with it. And now so for India and Pakistan, our main branch is located in Pakistan everyone can attend our debates however it's a Pakistani server specifically; a lot of the members are Pakistani. So for Pakistani server, I mainly do everything. For Mexico, I'm gonna be honest, I don't do that much. I literally just supervise things, I make posters, I make the debating format, but I don't do that much. Okay. Our wonderful, wonderful Mexican manager, his name is Maya. He is a very, very talented individual and he is able to supersede everything that goes on. He has a council of his own in Mexico that helps him organize these debates. So we have sort of a hierarchy. So, It`s his council, Then Head of General Affairs Tanisha and then me. So it's a very sophisticated process. I like to put it that way because well, I made it. But it's very, very organized in my opinion. And because of this process and the system, we're able to, you know, hold these debates successfully and manage everything. Okay. So, could you please like, tell us know what type of debates you focus on? Like, on what basis are the debates held? So, debating, for me, started out with a Model UN`s. So, I thought it was extremely important to put the Model UN type debate in there. So, we have MUN, we offer that as an opportunity to like to go out and debate at MUNs, have a little bit of practice. But we also; I recognize that I'm a really, really big fan of the show called 'Suits', if you ever heard of it. I am an avid consumer of Suits merchandise, Suits TV show things. It's one of my favorite TV shows of all time. And 'Suits' is about law and in suits, they have these things called 'Mock Trials', which're basically, pretend trials, okay. And they work by US law or UK law. They happen a lot in the US and the UK. They're not exposed in Pakistan and India that much. I've never heard of mock trials in Pakistan before. and I've asked people around, I don't think there's that many in India either who know about it. So, I thought it was extremely important to venture onto this new debating style for people in India, Pakistan and Mexico as well. So, I introduced mock trial to these people, to everybody in our society. And then, a parliamentary debate was another thing. Parliamentary debates also were near and dear to my heart, I attended a couple of them. And they were very important to me. And I felt like they discussed very important issues in our day to day lives, as citizens of our countries and as citizens of the world. So I decided to incorporate parliamentary debates. But this is very important. We will literally conduct any debate, we are literally thinking about holding a Sci-fiction debate next week. I'm literally thinking about this right now. regarding an Anime, okay, just because a lot of our followers know anime. And I'm gonna ask one of our managers who's really big into anime. I'm gonna ask him to, like, you know, plan this out with me, explain it to me, I'm gonna have to do a little bit of research to read the manga or something. But um, we're literally planning this. So if any of our debaters want us to hold a specific session, or a specific type of debate, I will go for it, if it's manageable, easy doing, educational, I will go for it. That's our main goal. Yeah. So Azmir, what are the three words, you would describe yourself with and why? I would describe myself with Sarcastic, I would think I'm very sarcastic at times, in terms of my speaking and by jokes. I'm very sarcastic at times, I like to think I'm a very jokeful person. I don't know if that's a good thing. But uh, yeah. And I like to think of myself as I hope this isn't self-absorbed But I like to think of myself as smart. Sometimes, I feel like I do have the ability to be smart at times. And I like to think of myself as progressive, I don't like to, you know, hold things off. I don't like to procrastinate. Just because I think it's very unproductive. So I like to be progressive. Sarcastic, smart and progressive. Thats great!! Yeah, that's, I hope that's not too egotistical. Haha No, so finally, to wrap this up as leader and founder of the International Symbolic Debate Society, what advice would you give to anyone who wants to start a society and has an idea but doesn't know how? Guys, um, honestly, if your idea doesn't work out, just try again. I literally failed so many times, you have no idea how many times I've wanted to quit. I literally wanted to quit because I was like, nobody's coming to my debates, nobody wants to be a part of this thing. Why should I keep it going? I was so frustrated. And I was so mad. I took a lot of my anger out on everybody that wasn't coming that I knew personally, that promised me but weren't coming. I was really, really mad at them. Because people would Promise me that they were going to come in and they didn't show up. And it was a big deal for me. And I was like, well, we had these debates. We started off with like 20 members, and then people started leaving and it was a big, big, like, weird thing for me. And then all of a sudden, like everything just became more organized. I tried again; I hosted more debates. But thing that does help however was, we still encounter some of these problems today, like a lot of people sometimes still don't show up. A lot of these encounters that we do is that we make our loyal debaters people that attend our MUNs, so we make them try to crave the debates. So sometimes what I like to do with people don't attend, if I get a low attendance is take a break for a week or two and just not hold any debates. This is on purpose sometimes but this is not, it's not deliberately done, but it works out in the end. And we like for example, in our last debate Model UN for our Indian server, we did not get a lot of attendees and we were forced to postpone, okay. And I decided to let's just like move on let's stop this. We had a parliamentary debate a week later and then we stopped debates for two weeks. And now that we have a MUN implemented, but we publicized it enough, we did enough. And now we have like 25-20 debaters. So, it's working out pretty good. My advice would be just take a break, chill out and try again. It's gonna work out. So, thank you so much, Azmir. It was an absolute pleasure to interview you. All the way best with your society, hope it reaches great heights in the future!! Thank you so much. Team INSPIWIRE thanks you for your time and patience. Hope you had a great time working with us. Thank you for the amazing interview. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.