Area Level Contest - My Blue Chip Yield

Mid Oct'13 - I am dying little by little with each of the ludicrous joke being pelted around - I texted to my mentor seated a few seats away. It was the Division Level Contest for the humorous speech christened as "Splash". I was getting worked up speech after speech. 

"This! They are laughing at this! No one laughed at my Red Bull joke - the best in my repertoire, and they find top ten facial expression when a human encounters a "poop call" funny!!!". Disgusted, I turned to face the rest of the wolf pack from my TM club. The dragon lady seated next to me showed a post from the Facebook TL " I wish some people turn into a zombie, so that it is not illegal to shoot these idiots". Satisfied that everyone of us were in the same plank,I happily went back to my brooding...

Mid Sep'13 - The euphoric feeling of winning the Club level was evaporated long since. Eyes were set on the District Level. Anything less would be shame. I had the script. I had delivery. That's when everything began to fall apart. 

Mistake no 1:  A script requires a theme, strong open and impactful conclusion. I missed on the conclusion. True, the script was very good in terms of humor content but the lack of conclusion - something for the audience to take away was missing. 

Mistake no 2 - I was so used to practicing in a big stage. Walking around gave me the comfort. The stage at Shell restricted my movements and in a way the delivery was affected.

Mistake no 3: Always know your audience - I did not! The script did wonders at Club level as it was a young crowd and would have clicked at the Division Level. It so did not at the Area, where people were scarce and the laughs scarcer! The need to keep on tailoring your speech with every stage is a necessity.  I conveniently ignored that! 

A bit of soul searching made me realize that I became a bit too cocky; a bit too complacent. As I walked off the room after the Area results were announced; someone tapped on my shoulder and it was one of a veteran TM " Vamsi, you are a revelation". The head which was bowed down lifted a bit there. I had grown leaps and bounds as a speaker and the Area Level experience made me fell forward.  

Famous and Otherwise :)

1.The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” 
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

2."Spherical bastards!" - Zwicky when commenting on astronomers at Mt. Wilson. Why? "

Because they were bastards, when looked at from any side"

3.Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can break hearts.” 
― Tim Minchin

4. "After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true." - Spock

5. There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.” - John Lennon

6.“The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. ” 
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture 

7.Delivering a Humorous Speech is like delivering a baby. Fun to conceive but painful to deliver - Rajesh Natarajan

8.Life is like a game of puzzles. The winner is not the one who gets it right first, but the one who discovers what his pieces are - Me

9.I want to put a ding to the universe - Steve Jobs

10.I don't have dreams, I have goals - Harvey Spectar of "Suits" 

11."My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead. P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this - but I don't know your new address." - Feynman's last letter to Arline

12."If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody." - Holden, Catcher in the Rye

13.The great architect of Universe didn’t make the staircase to go nowhere – Grove Patterson

14. Goddess Saraswathi has Veena in her front hand and books at the back; signifies passion first and studies as a fall back option :)  

14.In this galaxy there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all that, and perhaps more...only one of each of us.

-Dr. McCoy, Star Trek, “Balance of Terror”

Master Of Ceremony :)

"Vamsi, we forgot to tell you. There will be a countdown from 10 and then you guys enter. Best Of Luck!"
The biggest stage yet, for me to fall forward.

Preparation: I gathered all the stage time I could before the big Annual meet - speaking,rather pitching,  to a bunch of newcomers for Toastmasters ; doing a book reading session for the book club of Ford et al. The script had to be reworked over the weekend as one of the fellow MC had to drop out. In a way it made life a bit easier. Kavitha, mentor and fellow MC, and I kept fiddling with the script till the day before the Annual Meet.

"You take the humorous part. Let me do the "official talk" - said Kavitha
I agreed. Participating at the couple of levels for the Humorous contest made me adept to the voice modulation to bring out the laughter.  

The biggest challenge for both of us was the dialogue part. As a Toastmaster, pausing during a speech comes in natural after a time. But waiting for the other person to finish and have a dialogue within the speech; making sure that the pause when the dialogue shifts from one person to the another looks like a conversation.

The other one was the wordings in the script. Unless it is yours, you can never get the delivery right!  As the lines i wrote found space in her speech and hers into mine, both of us kept getting stuck in the same place time and again in our practices. But somewhere we knew that when the mike is under our chins, all these creases will be eased out!

Aftermath: " You guys were simply unbelievable " - HR folks remarked after the initial round. Everything went like a breeze. The hand movements, stage presence and dialogue transition were smooth. Making the audience respond to the excitement or respond to the jokes with laughter was always the challenge and thankfully no grace marks were needed to pass the test!

True, as any performance goes, it could have been a bit bitter. The delivery could have been more authentic; facial expressions could have been better. Toastmasters sitting in the 2500+ strong crowd could easily pull out the errors but the overall feedback was very positive.

Before the start of the event, both of us were unusually calm. No butterflies and I was more concerned about my get-up ; something I shun most of the time. I figured out the reason
later - we were not doing the MC stuff for our personal recognition. We wanted to set the stage for Toastmasters to conduct events of such magnitude!

And we were fairly successful :)

The Best Talk till now - Dhananjaya J Hettiarachchi

" Dude, even if you are not a contestant, you need to go and hear this guy out" - one of my TM friend remarked. I was still sulking over the defeat at the Area Level Contest - I had the script, i had the delivery Sigh.. Sadly it didn't work out. 

I do, however, make it a point of attending contests as it is a true indicator of the level of the speakers you are competing with. More often, people make the mistake of attending their own club's session. It gives you such a parochial view on what the actual level is. Attending the Division Level was a wise decision. 

The highlight of the event was the one i had come for. A  talk by Dhananjaya J Hettiarachchi. It would be a shame to not verbatim his words here: 

1. Stop wishing and start wanting to become a great speaker. Everyone wish to become a great speaker, but when you align your action to your thought, you’ll start wanting to and will surely transform yourself.

2. Don’t have just a dream. Have a purpose. Because when you just work on a dream, you’ll easily get burnout when you fail at it. When you have a purpose, you’ll not stop at your goals and continue to set new benchmarks regardless of the outcomes.

3. “Who is your daddy?” – I refer to here the mentors(both genders). As you know, Dad’s are always the first person who support us regardless our success or failure. They push us and make us to come out of our comfort zones.  Hence surround yourself with daddy’s (both genders), rather than Venture Capitalists (who give-up on you, when you fail and only prefer to be with you when you are successful). Are you surrounded with daddy’s or VC’s?.

4. Don’t see your fellow competitors as your competitors, see them as your contemporaries. 

5. Be a better person, before you become a better speaker. If your life has never experienced tragic moments, you have no material. Take calculated risks and keep transforming yourself as better person every day.

6.  Never Give-up! Practice, Perseverance is the key to becoming a great personality. Magic is given to people who have never given UP! Never give upon your dreams and keep working on it passionately.

Tuesdays With Morrie

Before reading this book if any would have asked me “ How would you like to die” – my answer would be anything that wasn't slow and painful. A quick unconscious or an immediate death would have been a welcome for me. The thought of a prolonged physical deterioration or the rotting of your cells can be such a mental torture to the person who is dying and  his loved ones.  My view changed after reading this book.

Morrie Schwartz, the protagonist of this book was a college professor. He was hit by this terminal neuromuscular disease called ALS or it is better known as Lou Gedrig’s disease .ALS, as the book descirbes, is like a lit candle. Your nerves starts melting and it generally works it way up from your legs

The book revolves around a single class taken my Morrie on Tuesdays and there was only one student – the author Mitch Albom.  The curriculum revolved around one subject – the meaning of life. There were no grades. But you were expected to perform physical activities like lifting Morrie’s head or placing his glasses on the bridge of his. No books were used in the class and a funeral was to be held in lieu of a graduation.  There were no final exam but you were expected to bring out one final paper, a thesis of sorts. This book is that thesis.  “An old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lessons.

There is this wonderful quote in this book the says “ When you learn to die, that is when you learn to live” . We are all going to die some day or the other and in such a grand scheme of things, some of the activities that we do and most importantly some of the activities that we don’t do is what the book teaches me.

Morrie had asked the author to list down things that he wanted to talk about and those topics were converted into talks that happened on Tuesdays at Morrie’s place.  A wide of emotions and events were covered and the beauty of the book is that it gives a different perspective every time you read it.

William Shakespeare said: 

“Cowards are the ones who die many times

Valiant  are the ones who never taste death

Of all the wonders I yet have heard

It seems strange that men fear death

Seeing that death is a necessary end

Will come when it will come”

 Morrie Schwartz was a valiant one and the his last class’s  graduation was held on a Tuesday. 

The "Thing"

There is a  time when one come across a word, a phrase, an idiom or a stanza from a song or a line from a movie  and it strikes you. It inspires you. You want look at it again and again, even more so in times when things are not going your way; your wont to get reassured keeps happening. After moments, the train of thoughts takes you somewhere, you feel like eons has passed as you stare or listen to those words and you are taken in that it is not a word or a sentence anymore. It is a symbol.

I came across such a thing. "Thing" makes it sound so pedestrian. Bur it looked like a random "thing", innocuously printed out in a paper and stuck on a colleague's work desk. I started at it, I get lost, I realised it was a most beautiful poem. Ever. I don't read poetry nor deft in writing them. I do have any moral right to make such a judgement. But then I realise that I do because it is not a poem anymore- it has become an extension of myself. 

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever Gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
looms but the horror of the shade
and yet the menace of the years
finds and shall find me unafraid

It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.

The poem "Invictus" was written by William Ernest Henely, as a demonstration of his resilience following the amputation of his foot due to tubercular infection,and it is now pinned innocuously in my work desk hoping that it will become an emblem of some one else's life.  

The Journey of a Raindrop

“Born of originality are the droplets of rain which fall from the roof and hit the rain soaked ground were once the first raindrop made its tiny mark”


It knows the inception of his will not define him as it thunders down thousands of kilometer to reach the earth. The journey will.


 It does not how long the raindrop next to its will share the journey. The force of gravity will make sure they share a common destination. Though the voluminous space that the air commands, will ensure they do not share a common path.  The raindrop does not have a definite form yet, but it knows the forces of nature - be it harsh or kind will structure its journey and there by its shape for maximum effectivness. In its sojourn, it might collide with others and be damaged, or coalese to form as one. Some will be influenced by the wind..it knows it will go through many a transition. It will affect him, alter his course of journey but it knows no matter how brutal the transition is, it is perfectly shaped for the journey.It does not know which part of Earth it is going to end up in. Might be in the dense Amazon, or be a part of the bewitching Niagra Falls. It might end up pelting the roads of a city or the roof of a  skyscraper . Its presence might cause grief or joy. It will not know till the journey is over.

I find so many beautiful parallels to this and a similar paradigm stood out. One of them is the journey of the raindrop and us. We do not know where we are heading but are controlled by a common force. We will take different paths, we will bump into people, we will cross paths - some will come along us if the path is similar ; others will have be let go. We will take different forms , some willingly some forced upon us by nature. But we know these are essential tools for our journey. I might find the other's journey less painful - but I cannot take that path. I am meant to take mine and he his ; we cannot swap - the nature is not that kind. We are heading for a common destination , we will take take different routes, but exactly perfect for the journey that we set about.


As I stand under the rayless sky and watch the city getting soaked, the raindrops visible against the glow of the street lights ; the roads getting pelted mercilessly, people running to take shelter and among them a beautiful women trying desperately to escape. She is still in my range of view but something else snares my mind's attention from her : a rain drop that had found its way on the bonnet of a car. It slithers down, the romantics of which can only be captured through a poetry, and disappears. Its journey has ended though I am still staring at the bonnet ; the trail is still clearly visible.The  legacy of its journey  remains : the path.  

The White Knight

"Wickets will keep falling because Rahul Dravid cannot be at both the ends " - so said a placard held by a young boy sitting on the shoulder of his father as he watched a rather familiar scene in Indian cricket started to unfold :

Rahul Dravid being  in the middle during most dangerous phase on the first evening after Sehwag exploded and then extinguished. He was there to see Gambhir confounded by a pedestrian deliver; he was there during the tricky phase on the second morning. He was there to see the crowd giving a standing ovation to the Little Master as he walked in and again as he walked out ; he was there when Laxman blossomed; he was there when Laxman left; he was there when Yuvraj/Raina (and others lining up to fill the shoes of Ganguly ! ) tried to revive their Test career; he was there when they left; he was there to see Dhoni using his pads more often than his bat to defend  and he was there when the lower order imploded in a short time . Dravid was always there.

For me, an ideal Dravid innings needs a most challenging pitch. The pitch should be covered with a inch thick layer of grass else be crumbling like powder. Cracks where you can put your finger through or a sandpit would be ideal - anything to make the ball behave like a demented cobra. If it’s a placid pitch with the ball coming on to the bat, give me Sehwag; if there’s a truly great array of bowlers set to be unleashed, give me Tendulkar. If it's Australians, give me Laxman. If it’s a minefield, give me Dravid.

Arguments are abound that he is last of his breed - a classical test batsmen.  That there will not be someone to take the torch forward , that it will be impossible to find a younger player who prefers to glide the ball  through empty corners rather than  give the ball a good thrashing for 20 overs. A batsmen relying on his wrists rather than his shoulders will some be an endangered species some say.

The dread was omniscient after the disastrous tour of Australia, that he would adieu to the game that became his ideal. It soon became a reality on a hot evening  when I check my messages and one said " Dravid set to retire ". My thumb grazed the screen of the mobile and a gentle smile figured on my face. Not for him a last test series to commemorate his 17 years of vigilance, a simple press conference would do. People say retirement is like death, you know when your time is up. The Grim would have become clearer as he walked off from The Oval where four years back he was the architect of India's first win in Australian soil.

 I don't expect there to be another Dravid. He gave me the greatest joy I have ever got while watching a cricket match in TV or live. They don't come back, and that kind of unadulterated delight in what is, after all, a game, cannot be matched when childhood gives way to adulthood.

The Indian cricket will not miss you Rahul;  they will yearn for you. Because you were the silent protector, the watchful guardian ,The White Knight.

CBI Charge Sheets Bal Thackerey for 15yr Old Case

" The caged tohta " created a sensation by charge sheeting Late Shri, Just missed the Bharath Ratna Awardee, Bal Thackerey for a 15yr old FIR lodged by an immigrant hailing from Budhelkhand- Karamveer Singh.

 Karamveer, as per report , had alleged that Shiv Seniks had bashed up his Vada-Pav stand as the shape of the vada was not meeting the "elliptical" standards set by the seniks. "The major axis of the pav was below the specified limit. The humid weather was the culprit. It was the act of god and these saniks manne te hai ki Bala sahab hi unke bhagwaan hain. What to do now? " 

The file reached the CBI director's office after a 10hr "dust cleaning" monitored by the junior workers. An immediate inquiry was formulated and the a SIT team was sent to "Matoshree". Officers were dumb-founded when they came to know that the "Tiger" had passed away almost a year ago. CBI director has squarely blamed the Govt of India and the falling rupee for this gap in communication. Govt has authorised us to only DD News feeds and no information has come from there regarding Bala Saheb's death

Calls to DD News went unanswered as they were following an important lead concerning the current economic condition - " Whether Rockstar Rajan of RBI has been signed for Dhoom-4" 

. 

"Tandoori Chicken will be our National Bird" says Rahul Gandhi

With the general elections coming up in 2014, the think-tank of Rahul Gandhi's team has come up with an innovative idea to garner vote from North India state - to make Tandoori Chicken as India's national bird. The news was met with mixed reaction from across the country. The dhaba-wallas from Punjab were obviously delighted to hear the news. Says Rangith Singh - "We will now get subsidized chicken through the food security bill as it will also cover our national bird".

 Many political analysts believe that this will ensure strong foot-hole for the congress party in the Northern State. We caught up with Ramchandra Guha and he was quoted saying "This shows that the Rahul is not a chicken anymore." 

At the other end of the spectrum, the Iyer/Iyengar community were up in arms with this decision. The so-called "learned" community of India tried to burn the effigy of a chicken to protest, but it was called off as it signified a "tandoored" chicken. A more erudite approach was then adopted of holding a candle light vigil. "They are only holding the candle as there is no electricity for the past few hours" said Ram Singh who works at a Punjabi joint - Pait Pooja, 

Meanwhile to cash on the controversy, the makers of the sleeper hit movie "Luv Shuv De Chicken Khurana" have announced a sequel to the movie, tentatively titled  - "Luv Shuv De Chicken Gandhi"...