My Icebreaker speech at Toastmasters

This town has holy places like Vemulawada, Dharmapuri and Kaleshwaram. Kaleshwaram is the meeting point of river Godavari and Pranahita. Do you know which town from AP I am talking about?

I will give you a clue: Do you know where PV Narsimha Rao is from?

It also has an NTPC which is considered one of the best thermal power stations in India.

Well. I am talking about my hometown, Karimnagar which is 165 Kilometers from Hyderabad.

I was born in a middle class family. My dad is a Bank officer and Mom a teacher. I am the eldest of the 3 brothers. I did my schooling in Karimnagar till Xth. I never realized when I got to finish the school and went on to college. My best days at school were in 9th and 10th standard when I used to bunk all post lunch sessions on Thursday to watch movies. Whenever there was a cricket match, I used to team with my Best friend and device innovative plans to bunk school. Be it onions to increase our body temperature or giving birth to crazy household functions. We used to call Sundays as S Square (Sensational Sundays). Sundays used to be time for playing cricket, trips to nearby forts, long rides on bicycles, slow cycling competitions. My inspiration from my childhood has been my younger brother, who is a genius at anything he does and knew what exactly he wants from life. He used to participate in many competitions and we used to enjoy getting up early morning to discuss on the same.

I did my management course from BITS Pilani. My graduation at BITS has been wonderful experience. BITS was a cosmopolitan place with a mix of different cultures. BITS had extreme weather conditions. In summer, going out in sun literally burns your skin. And winter used to be so cold that our 8 AM tests had us rubbing hands together to hold the pen. It was amazing to be there with thousands of students spending so much time with each other. With attendance not being compulsory, it used to be absolute fun spending all the time watching TV, playing cricket or playing carom. I was lucky to have known Anand, my classmate at BITS who with his exceptional leadership & inter personal skills has been a source of inspiration till date. I used to be in awe of his visionary thoughts. I could improve myself a lot with his company.

As it is said all good things had to come to an end and I had to start working. Eventhough, I still am pretty thankful for the experience I received at CTS but after a year I was craving for doing and trying something different. At such time, Anand, my BITSian friend rang me up one morning and sounded me off about starting our own company. Frankly, I was scared of leaving my cushy, well paying job with loads of onsite opportunities and starting something which needed huge amount of responsibility and loads of commitment. I had thought about this for weeks, discussed with my family and other close friends. It took about a month to make up my mind and take the decision. I decided to work for myself and work with friends. I was also fortunate that my Parents and my Brother were very supportive of this endeavor.

Though I am not one to read lot of books, a very good friend of mine gifted me “The Alchemist” by Paul Cohelo when I was about to start the company. I loved the book and the message in that book to follow dreams. It made things easier for me during the initial days of our company. I always keep this book in my desk.
Thus we started our entrepreneurial venture, PennyWise Solutions in 2003. As Bootstrappers, we had our teething problems. I can never forget the times when we used to clean the hired computers on a daily basis, have food at Greenlands at 2 AM after 2 continuous night outs. I can still feel the pain when our important resources we had trained for months together left us during project delivery. But what maybe favored our setup was the inherent bonding all of us had. From being a programmer in CTS, to being Vice President of a company looking after its operations, interacting with the clients and executing the projects, it has been learning all the way. I believe wouldn’t have got this kind of exposure and experience anywhere.

There have been difficult times in these years, times of joy and moments of pain. It was difficult to venture into this and even more difficult to continue with this when all our friends were making handsome money and driving in cars while we were slogging in our office. Sometimes it was so difficult that some of us at different points have even thought about quitting. But then we got together and stuck ourselves well. Now we are in a good position. I remember this saying my brother used to say “Courage is not absence of fear. It is resistance to fear”. I could not agree with him more.

All through these years, I changed a lot in many aspects. The only thing that remained with me was my passion for movies and music. While O2 is elixir of life for all, its M2 (Movies & Music) for me. In school, I used to bunk classes to watch movies on the first day. In +1 and +2, I used to jump the fence (ours was a residential college) to watch movies and at work, I used to take permission to go watch movies. From 2004 Jan to 2006 July, I watched almost all the telugu movies First Day First Show. Roja is one music album I would remember through out my life. Before I heard music of Roja, I used to be a music lover and Roja made me passionate about music. In 4 yrs of my BITSian life, I had hardly missed buying a single movie album released during that period. My other passions are dance, riding bike and Tae-kwon-do.

As Robert Frost says, Two roads diverged in a wood, and I... I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. I hope to make this difference not only in my lives, but at least few other lives.

My Icebreaker Speech experience!

I had my Icebreaker (first speech) at Toastmasters on last Sunday. It was a great learning experience not in the routine way. Icebreaker speech is the first speech to introduce the speaker to the group and identify scope for improvement. The objectives for preparing the speech are clearly defined in the manual and that helps you structure your speech.

I was assigned a mentor and the mentor called me up a few days before the week, gave an outline of how I should proceed, the speech structure, opening & closing and took me through a site http://www.ted.com which had great audio/video files of some great speeches . He taught me how to measure the time by just writing the speech in Arial font 10 size in an MS Word document. I was quite surprised that my mentor took so much time out of his schedule to explain me these things and later even review my speech through a couple of iterations. Not just this, he was even excited to go for a dry run and wanted me to get prepared well.

I decided on giving Icebreaker on Tuesday night and got it confirmed on Wednesday. I took some time and tried to write something about myself. I was very busy through out the week and could not spend much time in fine tuning it. The speech was in some presentable form on Friday and realized on Saturday that I was only 50% ready when I first try to give a mock. After giving a couple of mocks, I timed the speech to be about 9 minutes when the alloted time is between 4-6 minutes. It was a tough task to cut down the speech from 9 minutes to 6 minutes maintaining the flow and covering all aspects of my life.

When I reached the Toastmasters venue, I was even more surprised as another member enquired about my speech and volunteered to listen to it when I told him that I couldnt give a dry run to my mentor. He heard my speech and gave a very positive feedback which helped ease my nervousness. With so many inputs and so much of help, there was no way that I could not do the speech well. I did it well and even won the Best Speech award. Not bad, I can speak too!

Wait, the good things arent finished yet. My mentor even sent me an extensive mail after my speech giving the feedback how my speech went on. This was the best & most valuable feedback somebody ever gave me.

Wowww! Isnt it amazing? I cant just wait for my next speech :)