The First Post

After procrastinating for ever, I finally started two things this week - Blogging and toastmasters' While the first one is a result of the second one, primarily because I wanted to share how my experience with toastmasters' and for that matter various other things is going, and hence the synchrony, nevertheless I had always wanted to start writing something which could possibly take the place of a personal journal which I have taken a break from, for a long while now.

Today, I delivered my first speech at the toastmasters' club which I joined recently. The objectives for the first speech are : To begin speaking before an audience and to discover speaking skills you already have and skills that need some attention. In this assignment, typically one talks about anything that concerns him. This is the time when the audience gets to know the person. I chose to talk about three festivals and the related memories which I used to love when I was a kid. But as always, procrastination kicked in and I did not start preparing until last night when I prepared the speech by 1 am, even though the plan was to have the speech prepared by Sunday. I did some mock rounds of the speech during the day and finally at 7:30 pm, stood in front a small group of people to evaluate me. It lasted for almost 5 minutes and I was surprised that I was much less tense during the speech than I had expected. Apart from some number of Umm and Ahhs, I think things were fine as was reflected by the evaluator's speech later. I was so happy after the speech, that I signed up for another one to be delivered next week. More than the speech itself, it was the preparation that I enjoyed. While writing the speech, as I was reminiscing old times when I was really young and the festivals celebrated at home with the family used to be so much fun, I could see vast difference in the perspective of things at that time vs now. Now that I have not been with my family for almost 7 years on any festival, a reflection of the events at that time and the simplicity of the way things were, makes me feel that there are so many things that we take for granted in our day to day life which we would do anything to get back at a later point of time.