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.