Bangalore SHG Meetup April 07 2012

Hello guys,

Here are details of Bangalore SHG meet up – April 07 2012.

Theme of meet up – ‘To introduce your partner with other members’

Attendees – Dinesh, Karthik, Jitu, Chandhan, Myself(Abhinav) and birthday boy Pavan

Today we decided to do something different. In every meet up we introduce our self, our strengths, weakness, profession etc but this time we decided to form a team of two members and each member was assigned task to introduce his partner. Each team was assigned 10 minutes so that both of the partners can share following topics with each other.

a) family
b) profession
c) Techniques used for improving speech
d) hobbies
e) strength and weakness

We had only 5 members including Dinesh at time when we formed teams. So we formed two teams and Dinesh became moderator ( he was keeping track of time 🙂 and he was also busy in buying cake for Pavan … Just kidding) . So Karthik and Jitu were in Team A and I and Chandhan was in Team B. We shared lot of things about our personal life with our partner and at the end each person from both the teams introduced his partner. This was good experiment because when we introduce our self we hardly speak for 1 minute but this time each member took at least 5 minutes to introduce his team member (People always find it interesting to talk about others :)) . There were two rules for introducing our partners

1. We had to follow bouncing style whenever we got stuck.
2. We had to keep walking while speaking so that our body and speech system should not freeze when we were stuck.

Dinesh offered us bubble gum and fanta before speaking. Dinesh is nice chap. Hopefully he will offer us lunch next time 🙂 🙂 .

After introduction of our partners we invited birthday boy Pavan . It was his first meet up. Pavan is tough guy. He spends two hours in gym daily five times a week. He wants to join army and he is determined to become officer in Indian Army.
He shared some parts of his life about how he started to stammer. Till first year of his college he was fluent speaker but at the end of 2nd semester he got two backlogs and after that he started to stammer.

By this time fanta got over and next turn was of Dinesh. Dinesh had Toastmasters meeting on Sunday and he had to introduce himself there, so he shared his toastmaster’s introduction speech with all of us. It was really awesome. I think Dinesh should write his speech here. .it was some four or five line speech and it was very good .. (Dinesh wants to explore poetry field now 🙂 ) .
After that all of us celebrated Pavan’s birthday and we sung birthday song for Pavan( though it was in Hindi and I was the culprit for singing in Hindi as I do not know any birthday song in English but it was fun) . Now Chandhan and Karthik shared TISA Chennai conference experiences. It was really great to learn techniques of other stammerers.

We still had half an hour left for the meet up to end so we decided to share jokes/ famous quotes. We took our mobiles out and started sharing the SMS jokes/forwards, we were not supposed to read out the jokes directly from mobile, the objective was to see it once or twice and then share the joke with the team without looking in to the mobile.
I never cracked jokes with my friends when I was in school and college because I feared that they will laugh if I will stammer. But today each participant cracked at least two jokes and I learnt the lesson that we should not hide our stammering. We should say what we need to say and we should not care about others if they will laugh or not. After all

“Life is not about impressing others . Its all about expressing yourself.”

So Listen to John Mayer Song (Say what you need to say) and express your feelings with the world. Life is for enjoying every moment, not for cursing ourselves for stammering
.It was great meet up guys. See you next week 🙂

P.S.
Despite having office on Saturday, Abhinav made it to the meeting and then went to office. It is people like this who will make difference to themselves and others!

Post Written by : Abhinav Singh.