“Thump… thump… thump… drump… DUMB… DUMB…”
My heart was lambasting me. I was standing alone on a
podium. My school, sorted height wise into neat lines, stood staring at me. I was supposed to say the ‘Message of the Day’
– ‘A sleeping fox catches no hen’, as
assigned to me by Mrs. Kunar, our class teacher. What did it mean? What was so
remarkable about someone not being able to sleep and catch someone else in
parallel that it had to be announced to half and a quarter thousand boys and
girls in the morning assembly? I wasn’t sure. What really mattered was that I
had muttered the sentence under my breath all morning, and not once did it
sound right. The accent sounded vernacular, the articulation crude. This was
clearly not my job. And yet here I was, on my way to make a mockery of myself.
My heart was lambasting me. I ignored it, and uttered the
words in haste. My school stood silent. I couldn’t look them in the eye, so I
couldn’t gauge their expression. Did they hear it well? Should I repeat myself?
Should I proceed straight to the school anthem? Did I remember the school
anthem?
My heart was lambasting me audibly. I could’ve faked a
stomach ache in the morning and missed school today. I could’ve collapsed on my
way to the podium – acted unconscious for the next half an hour. I had wasted golden
chances to escape this ignominy, and random words from the school anthem were
now escaping my memory. The principal and the teachers stood behind the podium;
I could hear them breathing. Their collective breaths pronounced their growing unhappiness
with me, the class topper. I started singing the first line of the anthem and
then lip-synced the rest of it along with the singing crowd. At the end of the
assembly, Mrs. Kunar asked me whether my microphone had stopped working. I avoided
her gaze and mumbled vague words.
I was in Class V then. In the next two decades of my
academic and professional life, I would avoid almost every opportunity to face
an audience. Exceptions would be few, far between and nauseous. My parents had
me trained in music, and yet none of my school mates or colleagues would ever
hear me singing solo. In chorus performances, I would position myself away from
the microphone so that if any individual voice were to become too conspicuous,
it would surely not be mine. Off periods in school would make my classmates
cheerful and me wary, lest a replacement teacher should choose to pass his/her
time by asking us to sing or recite. Knowledge transfer sessions in office where
I was required to present would have me looking stiff and struggling to frame
my sentences, and not because of lack of knowledge or experience. All these
years, life and I have fancifully taken each other close to and away from
triumphs and failures, love and betrayal; but my fear of public speaking has always
hung around my neck – like a rock I’m married to for life.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to break this obnoxious bond.
However the world I inhabited till some twenty days back was that of corporate
professionals; and that’s a world where you often share your coffee break with smiling
vampires. Would you want vampires hovering around your bed while your wounds
get opened and operated upon? Nay!
For some time now, I’ve also wanted to reclaim my piece of
the sky, where I could quietly work on myself, away from vampires and the unentertaining
melee of regular cockfights. My current joblessness has helped me achieve that
space.
Earlier this week, I called up some of the local
Toastmasters’ clubs with an intention to join one of them. For those of you
unfamiliar with the term, Toastmasters is ‘a
USA headquartered nonprofit educational organization that operates
clubs worldwide for the purpose of helping members improve their communication, public
speaking, and leadership skills.’ (Source: Wikipedia). You could read more
about them here.
You see, I’m finally ready to put myself out there, on the
dreaded podium, and allow myself to stutter and mutter and forget my vocabulary
in front of a live audience and bore them to death! I, a lost class topper of a
long lost era, bring to myself the ignominy of failure so that I may try and take
a step beyond it. Dear reader, would you wish me luck?
“And the only way to
get rid of a shadow is to turn off the light. To stop running from the darkness
and face what you fear, head on.” – Grey’s Anatomy
Originally published in The Ascent
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