We have a Toastmaster's club in office, which decided to organize a speech contest. The President of the club happens to be my cubicle mate and also a very good friend. He got a little carried away by my natural talent of blabbering a lot and felt that I would be a good person to participate! I kept resisting, but he went ahead and registered me anyways!
So there I was, bullied into participating and needing to talk about myself for about 3-5 minutes! And the speech needed to have a dash of humour as well! After spending some time on deciding what to talk about and failing to come with any good ideas, my blog came to my rescue - I decided I would talk about "What's in a name?"!! :-D I was still apprehensive about going and speaking in front of an audience and had once last chance as I had a meeting scheduled at exactly at the same time. But I had a colleague stand in for me and off I went to face the music!
As it happens at Sun, out of 900 odd people only 8 had participated (read that as 7 and 1 forced!). But surprsingly the number of people who had turned up to witness the event was quite large. Anyways, we had to draw lots to decide the order in which we would speak and as luck would have it, I was the last speaker...kinda like how I would always have the last roll number in school :-) The contest started off slowly but soon picked up pace and speakers 5-7 really raised the bar! Finally the moment of truth arrived and I walked up to the dias. Till that point I was super confident and then it happened. Panic struck, I got nervous, hands started sweating and I began mumbling some nonsense! I was speaking in front of a large crowd after a gap of 11 years - the last time was in school in an elocution contest - and the result showed! I ended up creating some part of the speech on the fly, cracked some lousy jokes and basically made a hash of things :-D
So as I had expected, speakers 5-7 won, and was glad that my colleague won the first prize :)
I ended up with a participation prize - a Toastmaster's clock!!
-uv.
p.s. the best part is, I use a blog to give a speech and then write a blog on the speech i gave :-D
2 comments:
u shud have posted an image of u with the toastmaster's clock !
LOL !
LOL...am considering joining the club seeing how badly i screwed it up :-P of course, tat decision has been taken on the spur of the moment..knowing me I am not go ahead wid it :-D
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