gave a speech today… at some “IIT aspirants seminar” organized by 2 juniors from IIT along with the able support of The Hindu. It was aimed at 10th and 11th standard kids to inform and motivate them regarding IIT so that more people from B’lore would land up at IIT (right now it’s an abysmal avg. 30 per year; gultland puts in 200).
other speakers included a retired IIT prof, cueballs’s dad (IITM alumnus; former Sr. VP at Infy; now founder and CEO of dreamworks) and Hareesh’s dad (an IAS officer; IITM Mech; said he follows this blog !!??!). me, as usual, was last to arrive, arriving JIT at 2 pm.
event started off with a set of speeches by some ppl in the Hindu and us getting our momentos (!!??!… i thought momentos were typically given at the end). then, one by one each of us speakers was introduced and then asked to address the gathering. for my intro, i had sent them my resume and also a short write-up about me written by sathya. the announcer chose to read out my resume (a two page thing) in full!! wanted to laugh but the focus was on me…
speech didn’t go too well… though mom told me i spoke well… i thought i stammered too much, there was way too much discontinuity… i forgot stuf… etc… however, i managed to pick myself up before the Q&A session and was back in my elements while taking on the questions…
and before the questions, there was this arbit “parent” from Davanagere who started rambling on arbit stuff about district headquarters. no one was listening, not the least us “dignitaries on the dais” (i thought when one of the ‘dignitaries’ was speaking, others were supposed to listen; but the other dignitaries (much much senior to me) kept talking to me… me being the bachcha, had to talk to them). finally a firm tap from someone from the Hindu sent back this arbit guy…
at the end of the talk, there was some ACP by some students and some parents (remniscient of the speech i gave at the BASE function last year)… and yeah, cueballs’s dad had been informed by hareesh’s dad about this blog, so he comes and asks me for the URL. so i guess he’s also reading this…
then, i was almost pissing in my pants (had made up my mind to finish the aquafina before me on stage)… slowly walked to my car and then my parents weren’t picking up the phone… 20 painful minutes later, my mom picked up and told me where she was… (was quite nearby actually)… what a relief…
nice footage these kind of events give you… probably since this was the first time, i kinda enjoyed it. though i still think i could’ve done much much better. hmmm…. let’s see…