Toastmasters CC

You can find my speeches from the Competent Communicator manual below. I have found that writing speeches is only a small part of the game. The main part is always delivery, delivery, and delivery! I am trying to experiment more with impromptu speeches and I'm slowly weaning myself from pre-prepared texts by using memory cards.

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Speech# 3

Date: 17 Jan 2012, Location: S. Loop SpeakFreaks - 1 N Franklin @ Downtown Chicago, Allowed Duration: 5min to 7min

Background - I shared my craaaaazy skydiving experience with the audience. You want to know more? Please find the speech below!

Are You Ready?

Are You Ready? This is a question people usually ask you in some not-so often situations.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I was asked this question by my skydiving instructor 2 seconds before jumping out of a perfectly good aero plane. I don't think I was ready. See usually when I jump out of aircrafts, it is 3:30 in mornings and I am dreaming. The only difference in real life was I was strapped to another male body which isn't my idea of spending the last 10 minutes of my life!

Today I will be sharing my skydiving experience with you because of 2 reasons -

1. I need to complete 1 more speech from my CC manual

2. I want to describe how that experience was.

I bought a tandem skydiving ticket last summer from Chicago's Skydive Midwest. The usual price is $180+ but you might get a better deal through some online offers. I scheduled my skydive for Oct 29th last year and arrived early that day for the skydive. I was told that morning hours are quicker as the wind tends to pick up during the late afternoon hours in Midwest area.

After signing the so-many­ waivers, they put me through a class where they teach you about parachutes, landing, gestures, blah blah blah which I can promise you...you won't remember the moment you are in the air and see the earth from 14500 feet!

We finally took off at around 11:45 and reached our 'Drop Zone' within 15 mins. I was the last guy or the last 2-man group to jump out and its really unnerving to watch 7 people screaming as they jump out one by one right in front of your eyes. See in Toastmasters, being the last speaker helps as you get more time to calm yourself. In Skydiving, being the last jumper sucks.

Minutes before my jump, I was provided with protective eye covers and gloves. At 12:00 hours, my instructor did a final check on all the cables and pushed me towards the open door. The moment we reached the gate, he paused and asked me....Maddy, are you ready?

I wasn't. And of course, he sure wasn't waiting for an answer. In the next moment, everything changed beneath my feet. We were in air falling down at over 120 mph. If you have been on a roller coaster you know that tingling feeling in your stomach. Skydiving is different. You don't feel anything. Its as if you are on top of a car being driven at 120 mph.

Free fall is the best part of your skydive. It usually lasts 1 minute and a small brake parachute slows you down before your main canopy is deployed. Also, you use your leg movements to cancel out any spin. You may feel a little nausea but I guess when you are just out of college, feeling nauseated aka drunk on a Saturday afternoon is quite normal.

Once my instructor deployed the main parachute, our descent slowed down considerably and he could show me different pointers on the horizon, such as Chicago, Wisconsin, etc. This probably was the most soothing part of the skydive, because you know your parachute works and the ground just looks beautiful right beneath your feet. It took us around 10 minutes to reach our landing zone. While you are in the air, you cannot guess how fast you are coming down until are really close to the ground. Skydiving is a surreal experience but all hell breaks loose at the time of touchdown depending on your landing speed and angle. I had a bottoms down landing which thankfully went perfectly well.

I later researched and found that statistically speaking, Skydiving is much more safer than driving your car. In 2010, United States Parachute Association recorded only 21 fatal skydiving accidents in U.S. In 2009, there were 400,000 jumps made by first timers out of a total of 3million jumps! According to HowStuffWorks.com, the probability of someone dying in a skydive is 1 in 100,000 if that person makes 1 skydive every year. And we all know that statistics lie. I believe that skydiving is a risky game because the cost of making an error is one's life. You can complain about a car not starting but no one has ever complained about their parachute not opening!

I'm not sure if I'll skydive again. I want to but no matter how much I'd say that I want it now...I know I'd chicken out at the gate when someone would ask me - Are you Ready?

I won't recommend skydiving to anyone of you because it is crazy, but you should remember this one thing from my speech today....if everything goes well, Skydiving does make an amazing Facebook status message.

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Speech# 5

Date: Sometime in Feb 2012, Allowed Duration: 5min to 7min

Background - Its time you meet my fictional character: Daniel Smith. Anything in BOLD generated giggles, smiles, or those very polite ways of laughing in public!

Of the People, By the People, For the People

Daniel Smith is a good man He owns a house, has a job, makes monthly loan payments on his car, loves Super bowl, aaaaand he votes in every election. But I don't think he is a happy man right now.

See, he is a little disappointed with all the action that is happening in Washington. The debt crisis, the PIPA and SOPA bills and so on. Given a choice, he'd like to bring more right people to do that job but for that he needs more awareness of the issues.

Tonight, I won't be speaking on behalf of Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Tea Party, Coffee Party or anything like that. Also, I am not going to complain about individual politicians but.....I would question the current system of elections.

Daniel Smith thought choosing the right man for this job was his only task. What he desperately wishes now is a system where he too can participate in the decision making process. But sadly, he can't. Also, he understands that he or the majority of the population cannot make decisions all the time. If 99% of the people can decide for the remaining 1%, the country would become a mess. Look at Greece if you want! Or in US, 99% of us want the oil prices to be $2 at pumps but if we get to force this decision on the remaining 1% (oil companies, economists, and traders) our debt crisis would have been wooooorse.

So Daniel Smith agrees that he cannot decide on every issue by popular majority. But he'd like the freedom to contribute to some decisions which affect his right to freedom such as SOPA etc.

The whole idea of democracy or a republic is to give the people like Daniel Smith a choice to choose their leaders. President Lincoln once said "Government is of the people, by the people and for the people." Technology already helps us in this process by letting us share information or helping us follow news to make better choices, or even in making the voting process smooth by using electronic ballot machines. But why...why we cannot permit Electronic Voting? It doesn't matter how much technology has advanced, how we all speak about Androids and Mandroids, but we still have to GO TO a polling booth and come out with that black ink mark on our fingers?

If you type on Google 'Why can't we vote online', you get 129 million results! So at least people are talking about it, but there is no definite direction yet in changing a tradition that is over 200 years old!

Yes, there is an issue of trust. Computer networks can be hacked into and the future of a country can be compromised by just few very intelligent people sitting on the desk. But these are challenges that can be addressed.

We could decentralize the data centers. We can open online voting for people who match certain conditions such as geographical areas, age groups, passport requirements, etc. As per CNN reports, 80 Canadians cities and towns have experimented with internet voting in municipal elections. There is a town by the name of Markham in Ontario that has offered online voting since 2003! A study done by digital-strategy firm Delvinia showed that early voting increased by a whopping 300% in Markham by introducing online voting option.

What's more important is that it helps more people come into mainstream by being an active part of decision making. And Canadians are not alone. Even Sweden. Latvia, and Switzerland have tested internet voting. Starting 2007, Estonia allowed online voting in their national elections. Now if Canadians can do it.....it is fine. But if Swiss can do it as well, I'm pretty sure US can do it...and do it damn well!

If implemented, such an infrastructure would not be a waste as the same system can be called upon to hold referendums, such as public outrage over the anti-piracy bills which I believe is the handiwork of big media companies.

Online voting may not be technically easy, but it is neither impossible. It might just give each one of us a better chance to become a part of the decision making process.

For the records, I don't know who the hell is Daniel Smith and I hope by now you may have realized that he resembles people like us, who want to choose the right people to do the right thing for us. And even if Daniel Smith existed somwhere in Chicago, I'm pretty sure he would love the idea about online voting.

Thank You.