Ruwi Toastmasters Club: 102nd session

Here we go again. A session without a project speech from our members.

But is that the only thing to keep a session going? No! Read on to find out what RTC did to fill the gap in the menu with exotic dishes.

The session started bang on time at 3.15 pm, thanks to our ever-vigilant SAA TM Raja.

Today the President's role was being played by TM Mathen as President had other roles to play. TM Mathen told the story of how an ancient giant of an oak tree that had weathered many storms and lightening was finally brought down by small beetles that ate away its inner core. Similarly, we often deal with external challenges very well, but are eaten away by our internal emotions and prejudices that weaken us. Unlike the oak tree, we have the power to be aware of this and prevent this from happening. Thank you acting Prez, for that inspiring story.

TMOD role was taken up by MTM Panna, who had chosen as her theme "Offsprings". One could not think of a title with more universal appeal (except, perhaps, "exchange rate"). She took us into the families of all the role-players, their children when they were small to what they were now and what the role-players' thoughts, apprehensions, dreams, interactions had been with them as they grew up. A sweet theme to play through and the audience enjoyed the light sentimentality.

Timer role was played by MTM Radha with great clarity and accuracy.

Wordmaster of the day was TM Bhaskaran who introduced the word AWESOME to the audience, that being his daughter's favourite expression of admiration. There was no difficulty in the round robin since, by training, Toastmasters find most things in life awesome.

Jokemaster was played by TM Ramalingam, who is probably thinking of taking up stand-up comedy as an evening profession. His very presence on stage invokes laughter from an expectant audience.

This was followed by the first exotic dish on the menu, a special occasion speech from the Advanced Communicator manual by TM Babu Srinivasan. It was a Roast, which meant TM Babu would be praising and criticising a well-known figure at the same time. TM Babu chose as the roastee TM Kumar, who Babu knew both as a colleague and as a fellow-TM and whom the audience also knew well. TM Babu conducted the roast very skilfully, by highlighting traits of TM GK that he admired, like work-commitment, courtesy, sense of timeliness, team-spirit etc, while giving humorous examples that had a twist in them, making all his comments seeming tongue-in-cheek. However, it never verged on insulting and the underlying admiration and affection came through. That is what makes a successful Roast. It was a learning experience for all of us.

Table topics were conducted by MTM Kaviya, who presented topics related to children and offsprings. The 5 speakers did fair justice to the topics and produced awesome mini-speeches.

General Evaluator was played by MTM Vaishali, who gave a mild recap of the evening's events.

The second exotic dish of the evening was a Quiz Session conducted by TM Chaitanya, himself an accomplished quizzer. A set of 20 questions were displayed on screen to which answers had to be written down on an answer sheet. TM Chaitanya had deliberately kept the level of questions medium to simple, in order to keep the participants' spirits up, but there was plenty of variety and a nice mix of sitters and medium-rare. All the audience enjoyed the quiz thoroughly and it seemed more like a picnic than a competition! Thank you TM Chaitanya for the great effort.
(By the way, the highest scorers were later announced to be MTM Rita and MTM Kaviya among members and Mrs Harini among non-members. Kudos!)

The session was concluded by TM Mathen who first wrapped up the business for the next session, then announced the awards and declared the session closed.

The day's awards were: