By Minal Shaik
There’s never a boring week at Greenwood High. This weekend the school saw the second edition of its super-successful model united nations, GWHMUN. We all awaited the return of this event, in a completely different form. Students from both the IB campus and ICSE campus collaborated to make the return of GWHMUN a resounding success. GWHMUN this year took the form of an online model united nations conference to deliver on its promise of quality debate, along with Rs. 40,000 in cash prizes, despite the raging coronavirus cases in India. The planning was cleanly done and everything was executed smoothly.
With seven electrifying committees, the stage was set for a weekend pumped with high-quality speakers.
Disarmament and International Security Committee – Junior, chaired by Eesha Gorti was a large, energetic committee filled with enthusiastic young delegates discussing the agenda of the illicit arms trade. The United Nations Environment programme headed by Pranavi Senthil discussed climate change with respect to economically backward countries. The Human Rights Council tackled the issue of persecution of religious minorities, chaired by Rishi Shah. The International Monetary Fund headed by Virochan Pandit discussed the possible transition to a new global currency.
One of the most awaited committees, The United States Congress with chairperson Pranav Guntupalli handled negotiations for a second stimulus package to revive the US economy. The Emergency Special Summit of the Crisis Committee chaired by Anshul Khandelwal took the delegates back 60 years to simulate the Korean War. The Secretary-General Aryan Ghosh’s Security Council also pulled them back in time to rewrite the history of the 2003 Iraq War. The MUN also had Aviral Bhardwaj as its Crisis Director, Abhinav Mohanty as Head of Press, IB MUN Prefect, Urvi Nath as Head of Communications, and Vidhan Sethi as Treasurer.
The two-day summit kicked off with an inspiring speech from the Principal Aloysius D’Mello and an address from Director-General Gourav Mittal from the school campus.
This was followed by three sessions of intense debate on the first day, and three more on the second. Instead of an all-encompassing closing ceremony, each committee had its own awards ceremony with Treasurer Vidhan Sethi coming in to give a small speech about the MUN and tell the delegates how they would receive their cash prize. Two days of breathtaking conferences came to a close.
However successful the online MUN proved to be, the experience will compare to a physical MUN. While GWHMUN did its best to replicate the atmosphere of a real MUN by making it as interactive as possible, it has nothing on the adrenaline rush provided by the intellectual atmosphere of a physical MUN. The fact that its online means that one of the most iconic parts of any MUN, the socials, is lost, which takes away a good event where delegates can interact with each other and make friends, and, of course, party hard. Eesha Gorti tells me that GWHMUN 2020 was not as universal of a Greenwood High event as it was last year. Despite the changes in situations, our school managed to deliver an impeccable debate in order to carry across the legacy left by the first GWHMUN.
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