Recently,I was a guest speaker at Daffodils Toastmasters and it was great fun !
I used to visit them during their pre -charter days and the transformation is remarkable !
Like they say ” To open a Toastmasters club is easy. To keep it open is not easy !”
You have people trooping in, taking a lot of interest and then vanish without a trace !
Here, the additional challenge was to get people together on a Saturday evening in a happening city like Bangalore . The initial days were bleak.. I remember giving demo speeches in front of a grand audience of five !
And now, just two years later, they have 50 members on roll with a healthy 75% attending each meeting ! From five to fifty ! I doff my hat to the dedicated band of TMs (it would be unfair to name just a few), who made this happen !
Packing the punch in the meeting was a lively bunch of techies, students and businessmen.
In the table topics, a speaker provided some unintended mirth which had the house in splits !
His topic was “My favourite singer”. He said ” Britney Spears”.Absolutely normal response. No damage done so far. When he said ‘her songs are informative and have a healing touch“, it was delirium all over !
Nandagopal, giving a project speech lambasted TV serials, commented that they were a blot on the landscape and pleaded that we junk the serials. Lots of contemporary humor.
The General Evaluator Vaishnav commented ” Now, let’s give our serial killer Nandagopal a big round of applause”. This comment went largely unnoticed but I thought that was a crisp sum up of the speaker’s message.
There are exciting things happening on a Saturday evening with a spirited team of Toastmasters in tow !
