Toastmaster's Advanced Speech 2 - "Love And Its Syndromes"

This is speech #2 from  "The Entertaining Speaker" manual, called "Resources for Entertainment". The objective is to draw entertaining material from sources other than your own personal experience and adapt your material to suit your topic, your personality, and the audience. Time allotted is 5 to 7 minutes.

“Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough”, said the great G. B. Shaw. Another great writer, Mark Twain, said, “The trouble with life is that there is no background music!” 

Good Afternoon fellow Toastmasters. These days I tend to agree with Mr. Shaw quite a lot and disagree with Mr. Twain just a little bit. I am guessing most of you present here would have watched the movie Main Hoo Na? Have you? Then you must know the Main hoo na syndrome; remember the scene – scenes: actually there were two – where Shahrukh Khan sees Sushmita Sen and his arms go up in the air on their own accord and violins start playing in the background? Well, that’s a blatant exaggeration. But then, for the major part of the movie the theme song keeps playing softly as if inside your head in a continuous loop – that, if you are a music lover is still believable. 

You see so many movies, read so many books, watch television, listen to countless songs, watch your friends fall in love and do things they otherwise wouldn’t; and you being your practical pragmatic self laugh at the senseless absurdity. Let me illustrate with a real life story. A couple of my friends, who are now married to each other but at a time were coping with the strain of a long distance relationship – and I swear this really happened – both used to look at the moon at the same instant! Like they show in gooey romantic movies! Yes, in the 21st century when you already have web cams, skype and video calling. Can anyone beat this Na Tum Jaano Na Hum syndrome? 

Then there is the who-will-put-the-phone-down-first complex, from the movie ‘Mere Yaar ki Shaadi Hai’: a couple is talking on the phone, both say bye, both don’t really cut the line, and the conversation goes like this: “You didn’t put the phone down”, “You too didn’t put the phone down”, “Ok, lets do it together, 1, 2, 3, cut.” And then once again, “You didn’t cut it this time either”. And we, the bewildered audience feel - someone cut the wire please and put the poor phone out of its misery. 

And there are so many others, Subodh from Dil Chahta Hai, giving a balloon everyday complex, Raj from I Hate Love Storys giving a flower everyday syndrome, I will bring the moon for you if you just say it; your feet are so beautiful, don’t put them down on the floor; the list is endless, and it makes you silently shriek..ughhh…stop it!! Stop it! 

But then one day, out of the blue comes a tall, not so dark, handsome guy, not on a white horse, but in his mini-SUV and sweeps you off your feet; all the romantic comedies you so categorically laughed at suddenly start dancing in front of you in mockery; all symptoms I just described begin to terrify you and you fervently pray not to end up as one of the examples. But thankfully, something similar to the Saathiya syndrome happens. The scene is - Suhani and Aditya are travelling in a Mumbai local and are having this conversation: 

Suhani: “So, you really love me, huh?” 

Aditya: “Absolutely. How can I prove it to you?” 

Suhani: “Jump off the train” 

Aditya: “I will. As soon as it stops.” 

Then your heart says, that’s my man. Then you start believing completely in Shaw’s Everything happens to everybody and totally discard Twain’s there’s no background music in life. Because, if you are really listening, there is.

This speech took 5:45 minutes to deliver and was appreciated for content and the ability to captivate audience. Body language could be improved.

The heart and soul of a speech – an (un)scientific derivation

"What is the most important aspect of a speech?" When asked this question, some are often perplexed and don’t have a ready answer, some even more so because they are Toastmasters! Ah….the irony of it….who else knows the innards and anatomy of a speech better than them? Starting from the beginning of a Toastmaster’s journey, the Competent Communicator manual projects guide them through the process of writing and delivering a speech – how to write an organized speech, how to make it apt and to the point, how to add shine and sparkle to it; what is body language, voice modulation, visual aids and how these can add value to a speech; how a speech should always be backed up by extensive research; and how to persuade or inspire an audience combining all the aforementioned attributes together.

With all that background knowledge, to single out the most important facet is indeed difficult. Being an engineer expert at drawing a graph first and noting the readings later, I decided to apply similar logic to this burning question and arrive at an answer. Reverse engineering is the second best solution to the most challenging issues, ask anyone working in the IT industry! (The best one is of course a machine reboot, but that’s sadly not applicable here.)

So for any given speech, if we take out the body language and expressions, would it still be a reasonably good speech? This one is easy; sometimes just listening to a speech and not watching the delivery arouses such emotions that hundreds of people are moved and motivated to take some action. Who can forget Pandit Nehru’s iconic ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour’ speech once they have listened to its audio clip? This conjuncture rules out two major factors and makes the choice that much easier for us, even Cassandra would agree. In other words, this ‘Listening can sometimes be as good as watching’ theory leaves us with the confidence that visual aspects can definitely be forgotten for now.

Does that mean voice modulation takes the cake? Again applying the same theory, let’s try removing that too - we are not watching a speaker, not listening to his/her speech delivery, but we are, wait for it…reading (yes! Genius thought, wasn’t it!)…reading the speech transcript. Now if anyone says that reading a speech has not made them laugh or cry at times, is definitely lying. We know that any speech worth its while would deal with an appealing subject, and would have an introduction that would immediately grab your attention, a body which doesn’t bore you and a conclusion summarizing and reinforcing the thought. Wouldn’t reading such a speech still have some degree of effect on you and serve its core purpose? There you have it – the heart of any great speech has to be its content. A syntactically and semantically correct artistic prose, laced with rich vocabulary, impeccable and relevant facts, aptly placed quotes, text that flows from one paragraph to another flawlessly and makes you think, feel, or understand: even reading such a speech material would have a profound impact. Q.E.D.

The next step in our logical analysis should be a corollary of the theorem we not just constructed, but even proved. For this, let us consider a speech that was delivered with the required conviction, with appropriate hand and body movements, expressions defying a mime artist, voice graph more rhythmic than an  ECG report, but with such grammar that made you flinch. Or some statistic that you know for sure is made up. Or with such a vocabulary that even your kid could manage better. Or a hasty introduction and abrupt conclusion. Could the immaculate delivery save such a speech? Surely not. Q.E.D.

In a nutshell, content is the lifeblood of a speech, its basis, its foundation. You add other aspects to it to make it stronger, more impactful and attention-grabbing; whereas content is what you use to even build up and utilize the other parameters effectively. Without good content, a speech is spineless. It’s like eating the cherry on top, without having tasted the dessert. Like tearing out the glittering gift wrapper to find an utterly disappointing gift within. A river sans water. A body sans soul.

Being a blogger myself, I admit that I am not totally impartial in this derivation, but hey….I did present a valid argument (thanks to reverse engineering!).