Staff Cultural  Co-ordinator: Dr. K. K. Mahato
Student Cultural Secretary: Miss Nilanjana Choudhury

Programmes organised:

1. PRAKAYA: the inter-college cultural and literary fest organised on the 17th and 18th of October 2008. Colleges from in and around Manipal actively took part in this fest and made it a grand success.

Various events included in this programme were:

POT-POURRI: In this programme, 15 teams from various colleges participated. MCODS Manipal emerged as the winner, with K.S. Hegde coming in a close second.

WHATS THE STORY: A new addition to Prakaya, ‘Whats the Story’ saw emerging authors use their ingenuity and creativity to successively build up a story-line on the given theme. In this programme, the ultimate winners were St. Agnes College, Mangalore, St. Aloysius College, Mangalore, and K.S. Hedge, in the first, second and third place respectively.

BIG FIGHT: Big Fight, the open debate event. In this programme, theme in the 1st round was ‘Indian Hockey – National sport only by name, actually our national scapegoat ’. In the 2nd round different topics like the national ban on smoking, the downfall of domestic capitalism, the forgotten North-East, and Atheism- guide to salvation etc were tallotted to different teams. The first place was eventually bagged by MCODS, Manipal who spoke on atheism, with the second place and third place won by K.S Hegde Medical College, Mangalore and KMC, Manipal respectively.

ICE BREAKER: The inaugural event of Prakaya 2008 was the Ice-Breaking session. The first place in this programme was bagged by the girls from St. Agnes College, Mangalore.

CONCOCTION: The Concoction, aka collage event received an enthusiastic response and MCON, Manipal emerged winners of the event.

NERVOUS BREAKDOWN: This was an individual event that consisted of two rounds. The first was a written round judged based on the ability of the participants to answer the questions under stressful circumstances. The next round was an interview in which each participant was interrogated by the judges based on their answers of the questionnaire for seven minutes. During this time period, the interviewer was constantly mentally strained as well with various auditory, sensory and visual distractions. MCODS Manipal bagged the first prize, followed by K.S. Hegde and KMC Manipal.

BATTLE OF BRAINS: Battle of Brains aka the Quiz event. Six teams qualified for the finals, where the team from KMC, Manipal was announced as the overall winners.

MAD ADS: In this event, each team was given a product and the participants were expected to present a unique, innovative advertisement for it in the form of skits, songs, dances, jingles, etc. The teams were judged on the basis of their creativity, narration skills and also their presentation as a group on stage. MCODS Mangalore almost brought the audience to tears with their hilarious ad on “the screw driver”, and was clearly the winner of the event.

SPEAK UP: Speak up was a conventional seminar on unusual topics such as i-pod: an impact on gen-x, does science have a soul?, psychology of serial killers, the lost planet, etc. Participants were judged on the basis of their presentation skills, knowledge of the topic and response to judge’s/ audience’ questions. The winners were K.S. Hedge, Medical College, St. Aloysius, and KMC Manipal, in that order.

JHANKAAR BEATS: Jhankaar Beats was our ‘Antakshari’ competition, wherein the contestants were tested on their knowledge of bollywood numbers. This event was also won by MCODS, Manipal

At the end of the two-day event, the overall champion was MCODS, Manipal, who went home with cash prizes and the overall trophy

2. CULTURAL WEEK (inter batch cultural programme): This programme was conducted in March, 2009 to search best talents among our students for participating in UTSAV 2009. Various events included in this programme were collage, English and Hindi poetry, Extempore, Jam, Debate, Rangoli, Painting, Cartooning, Eastern and Western solo singing, Eastern dance(solo), Antakshari etc.