Report - Bangalore SHG meeting - 27/05/2012

Today’s session began with brief introduction not of oneself but of others, each one of us was given partners and 3 minutes of time to know each other. I was the first one to jump into the process and I was handed with a noise cancelling headset and an android device with auto repeat voice connected to dual speakers. The game here was to close our eyes and concentrate only on


the content we delivered. Most of us did well barring a few including me who felt directionless without opening our eyes. Each one of us proceeded with introduction of partner’s name, profession, hobbies and things our partner has implemented in everyday life which was taught over last two weeks in SHG meet, in this case it was “think before you ink” & “promise”. Most kept the latter part of commitment while the former was not followed in everyday life unless they had prepared speech in SHG.
                                                                                                                       The second session was followed by our coordinator speaking out his thoughts on stuttering, this was an interactive session and everyone had an opinion and answers of their own. The first question was “what is stuttering” after lot of answers poured in we decided on cause and aftermath, with cause being “our thinking of past failures” and aftermath being “getting blocked on certain syllable or word”. The next question to follow was why we stutter and was beautifully answered by our coordinator as “we stutter because we try to outperform ourselves while speaking”. The third question to follow was how to overcome stuttering and we answered this question with various answers like slow speaking, talking more, applying techniques, slowing down speech rate etcetera, again the answer was as simple as we try to set expectation higher than reality, if we can speak at the normal rate our stuttering is under control and when we stress ourselves not to stutter and when try to fake our fluency the stuttering is at its worst.

The final session of our meet was prepared speeches, once again I began the proceedings with my prepared speech about modern dance avoiding most of the filler words, it was difficult to manage breath rate and speech but efforts are on to rectify identifiable mistakes, following speech was feedback from audience and this is the best part of having audience giving feedback on what to improve in next speech, Sairam was next on stage and he gave a wonderful speech on organ donation and also emphasized the importance and awareness about it. Rohit has presentation in his office and he took the opportunity to explain us about border gateway protocol, a presentation on networking and most importantly interesting topic he covered most of the points with minor glitches in speech, Dinesh Kadam (not our coordinator) jotted down what he wanted to speak and beautifully laid out his questions to us as to why we don’t stammer when we sing or whisper or when shouting at someone with anger, for which he received an unanimous answer that during this time our mind concentrates on the content of speech and not delivery of it. Abhinav took to stage next to briefly explain his views, it was a short speech but effectively given, Upasana was asked to summarize the proceedings of previous week’s meet and she abided her time to ease the word flow out of her mouth, she handled the stage with omnipresent mind and with relaxed attitude

                                               The final session was mostly pre planning of next week meet, Dinesh Kadam along with Chandrashekar need to perform a Kannada duet song, with jeetu and abhinav giving their first prepared speech and me of course ending it with a dance performance

Attendees: Sairam, Abhinav, Dinesh Kadam, Thanoy, Rohit, Jeetu, Upasana, Murali, Chandan, Chandrashekar our beloved coordinator Dinesh Singh and your narrator Pavan

P.S Write-up by Pawan.