Before starting with our wonderful NDP themed joint toastmasters meeting, SAA Aishwarya TC1 asked us to introduce ourselves one by one. Then our very own Club President, Marc Wong, DL4 made the Opening Address. He shared about Helen Keller’s world that was covered with silence and darkness. However, that all changed when her parents found a teacher, Anne Sullivan who made a great impact on Helen’s learning journey.
The Toastmaster of the Day, Helena Lim IP2, gave her introduction about the meeting. After that, our lovely Language Evaluator Aaron Ting DTM shared the word of the day which was to use adjectives.
The next segment was my favourite! The… prepared speeches segment! To start off, Anders Tay TM spoke about Uniqlo! He talked about something unique! He shared about something many people may not know, Uniqlo’s traditional patterns.
Our second speaker was Bharathamma Eswarawaka IP5, who shared about a very funny MRT incident which encouraged her to reduce her weight. One important thing I learnt from her speech was, ‘planning is not important, execution is important.’ Next speaker was Valliappan Selvamani CC, CL, PM1. He shared about a series of unfortunate incidents which made him realise that being first is not important. And I was surprised that his parents took a daring step to enrol him as the first student in a newly found school!. We then proceeded to the next speech by Ravindran Pandian DL4. He talked about how Covid-19 affected employees in his office in Singapore.
We had then finished the prepared speeches segment. What next? The Table Topics segment conducted by Rusman Hadijanto CTM, CL, DL5 First, Lorus Loh PI3, spoke based on a topic, ‘no competition, no progress.’ After him, I (Kavin) spoke on a topic which was, ’don’t quit, do it.’ Followed by three other table topic speakers, Siva Kumar, Rushvida and Aaron Ting.
After that, we moved on to the Evaluation, led by our four excellent evaluators, Sarah Ong IP2, Clarence Eng PM1, Marco Pesce DTM and Wee Chee Sian ACB, ALB, who evaluated our four wonderful speakers.
Next, we had a workshop on “Beginning and concluding speeches effectively” by Salma Begum, ACB, ALB. She shared with us 4 different techniques to start a speech. It was very lively, and I enjoyed it very much. Her humour and clarity was simply extraordinary! We then had the Ah Counter report presented by Helena Lim and the Language Evaluation presented by DTM Aaron Ting who extraordinarily evaluated everyone’s grammatical and spelling errors. Venkat Voleti PM2 was doing the timer role. Then we had General Evaluator DTM Patrick Sehoo to evaluate the whole meeting. Finally, to conclude the meeting, BHII president Lorus Loh presented the awards.
I congratulate the award winners:
Best Evaluator: Wee Chee Sian
Best Table Topics: Kavin Valliappan
Blog written by: Kavin Valliappan
