My Ice-breaker speech at Madhapur Toastmasters

Last Saturday I delivered my ice-breaker speech at Madhapur Toastmasters, and it was an amazing experience. After a very long time I could complete delivering a speech. Moreover, I spoke for 6 minutes !! And except for a few seconds long pause, everything else went smooth. My eye-contact was poor and I should have been louder, as per the feedbacks I got, but the stage hardly shook this time. I delivered the following speech:

A bit about myself

I’d like to start by sharing a real life incidence that taught me that everything happens for a reason. My buddy and I were racing down the slope towards the Officer’s institute on our bicycles. My friend pedaled a little harder as we reached the gates and gained advantage. I put in some extra energy too but unfortunately, the chain of my bicycle came off. I was in a critical situation on a fast moving bicycle. I decided to jump off the bicycle and run with it to catch up. I jumped off but forgot to apply the brakes. The next moment I was profusely bleeding from my knees and had bruised elbows.
Earlier that day, while filling some form for me, my father had asked me for two identification marks on my body. I only had one, i.e., a mole at the back of my neck. But by the end of the day, I had successfully got two more identification marks, one on each knee.
 
Sir Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and dear guests…
 
I am Abhishek Sainani, a student of IIIT-H pursuing MS by Research in computer science and engineering. My hometown is Pune, but I’m not a Marathi. I’m a Sindhi but I don’t know Sindhi. I get by using English and Hindi.
 
My father is an officer in the Indian Army; hence I was brought up in various different places in India. Over the years, I’ve developed a sense of belonging to the Army cantonment and my alma mater, the Army Public School as they were quite the same in every place I lived.
 
My mother is kindergarden teacher and pampers me a lot, she still does!
 
My younger sister is in 12th now and studying non-medical stream of science. She decided to follow my lead but like a good big brother I motivate her to study and understand things on her own rather than asking me only because I never understood any of the concepts properly, I just managed somehow. :D
 
Unknowingly I’ve always been following one rule in my life, to believe that future would be better than the present. I have had a great childhood, but also had fear of many things like deep water, heights, being on a speeding vehicle, ghosts, eating curd, syringes, strangers etc. When I observed that none of the grown ups had any of my fear, I assumed that as one grows, things get better. That’s why I didn’t worry about my fears and grew over most of them.
 
I never really liked “sainani” as my surname. It is so different, I used to think. I felt different and isolated. But people seemed to like the name ‘sainani’ and started calling me that and it became my identity! My respect for my surname took an exponential surge when I typed “abhishek sainani” in google and got few results corresponding to me. Since then I’ve been commenting on other’s blogs, writing blogs, reviews etc. online to increase the result in Google search for ‘abhishek sainani’. :D
I have three hobbies: sleeping, dreaming and reading.
I’d like to talk about dreaming. I used to day dream a lot in my childhood; imagine various desirable outcomes of an incident gone bad. One day I discovered that my thoughts during day time often became my sleeptime dreams at night. I told myself, woah! I think I might be having some kind of special ability and I started manipulating the content for my sleeptime dreams and succeeded in some cases. I always enjoy recalling my sleeptime dreams after waking up and for some time now, I’ve been keeping a sleeptime dreams journal as well and posting some of the interesting ones on my blog.
 
I’d like to share some interesting incidents that happened in my dreams. This one time I got angry at a ghost and punched him in the face. He got crushed to pinkish pulp. The ghost looked like the Vice-Principle of my school. This other time, I was almost killed in a fist-fight but I enjoyed it. And the wildest of all, I was captured by the terrorists and they interrogated me for information while I tried to convince them that I was a terrorist too.
 
I spend my leisure time either reading stories, watching movies and TV shows or talking to someone and listening to their story. I felt motivated to write a novel when I was in 6th class. I wrote two pages, describing a big, fast ship with lots of people going on a cruise, and then didn’t know what to do with those people in the ship. Lately though I’ve written one story each on two of my favorite topics: sleeping and dreaming. Perhaps at the back of my mind writing stories have always been my childhood dream, stories that capture the beautiful moments of life; stories about possible and impossible things that may happen in life.
 
As I have been penning down stories, I come to the conclusion of this story, which is just the beginning of a new phase in my life and I am sure I am out to gain here something because as I said, everything happens for a reason.
 
Thank you.

And then I walked back to my place, mildly shaken by the experience but it was every bit worth it !!