My Toastmaster's speech 10 - "A is A"

Its called "Inspire Your Audience" and objective is to inspire the listeners by appealing to noble motives and challenging the audience to achieve a higher level of beliefs or achievement.

I recently overheard a conversation while standing in a queue to check out my grocery. An elderly lady in front of me was talking to her husband – "You know what happened at Mr. Sharma’s yesterday? Poor old fellow, had a huge fight with his son, and now the son has threatened to throw him out of the house! i was so jealous of him before, that his child lives with him, but now I think we are so much better off, even if our kids are abroad!"

It was as if I was shot by a bolt of lightning at that time and I had this epic realization, or epiphany for that matter, that we are all inherently barbarous, and we derive happiness by comparing ourselves to other people’s miseries. Classic example is the very famous story of the beggar who has no shoes. He goes to the temple and asks God, "What kind of a God you are, when so many people have cars and scooters to go from one place to another, all I ask is for a pair of shoes, and you can’t even give me that?" Right at that moment, as if on cue, a legless man arrives there with a pair of crutches, and our beggar immediately apologizes and says, "Thank you God, I got my answer – at least I have feet and I am immensely grateful for that. I swear I will never complain about shoes now." So this beggar was unhappy relative to people owning vehicles, but is happy relative to a cripple. His state of mind depends on what is the recent thing he has seen and compared himself to.

Aren’t we all like that? Comparing to something or someone all the time? His rating is better than mine, her salary is lesser than me, his bike gives more mileage, my neighbor’s roses are so much more beautiful than the ones in my garden, abc’s child is so quiet and well behaved, why can’t mine be like that, xyz’s house is so small, thank god mine is bigger…and so on. I have seen people compare disability even, I have done it too at times, and now to think of it, it sickens me to the core. As some of you might be aware, my younger brother has cerebral palsy of all four limbs, meaning he cannot sit or stand on his own or use his hands or anything, but his IQ is normal. He used to go to a fitness center for physiotherapy where all kinds of kids with all kinds of disabilities used to come, and all parents used to compare to see how much raw was the deal they got. How can you compare a thing like this? Some kid, paralyzed from the waist below, someone was all ok, but was spastic and had epilepsy, some did not recognize their own parents but could do day-to-day activities on their own, someone was blind or deaf or mute….how do you decide who is better off? More important question is why do you have to think in those terms? If you do, there is no end, in either direction – no matter how bad your situation is, there always will be someone in a worse situation, and no matter how good the circumstances are, there will always be someone who is better off, more so, because it is an illogical as well as subjective comparison.

It’s like that ad on TV – some person is walking on the road wearing all white clothes with a smug expression on his face – look at the whiteness and purity of my attire. And then this packet of detergent goes "whoosh!" and you see the patch it created is somehow – whiter. I don’t get it. White is white, how can your white be whiter than my white? It’s a color for crying out loud.

Can we not be happy or satisfied in the absolute? Can we not build this world within ourselves; where we appreciate and evaluate others, be judgmental and have opinions, even put ourselves in others’ shoes, but not want those shoes? Or not feel the importance of our shoes after trying out theirs?

I say we can, we just need to give it an honest try. Just close your eyes for a few seconds and think, like Shakespeare said, all the world’s a stage and I have been given this role to play. Doesn’t matter if it is better or worse than anyone’s, its mine and I will do complete justice to it…no matter what. Because A is A. It is what it is. I am unique, one of my kind, born after so many evolutionary cycles, and i cannot be compared, whether I reach the depths of despair or heights of achievement.

Now open your eyes and see, the world is already a different place, where you are not taller or shorter or fairer or darker or richer or poorer. You are just you, and like the Rolling Stones once sang, "You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes well you might find, you get what you need."

This speech took 9:05 minutes to deliver and was appreciated for speech content, body language and voice modulation. However, more conviction was required during speech delivery. With this speech, i reached the Competent Communicator stage of Toastmasters.