On 26th November 2019, I was at
Bishan Toastmasters Club as Language Evaluator, my 127th club visit
on the 149th day of the Toastmaster year. Kokul Raj served as Sergeant-at-Arms. Kanchan Mendis served as Toastmaster of the
Day. Chen Li Ming served as Timer. Winnie Chong served as Ah Counter. Rakesh Kethineedi served as Table Topics
Master.
A Roast with Affection
Sophia Ngo opened her President’s address
with a roast of Celine Goh, delivered as a self-deprecating accolade coated in
affection. A roast that lands warmly
rather than cruelly is a harder speech to write than it appears, since the effect depends on the audience trusting the affection underneath the
barbs before a single joke is told.
Stress, Reframed Correctly
Tuyen spoke on the effects of stress,
arguing it is not stress itself that affects us, but our reaction to it. This is not merely a motivational turn of
phrase. Dr. Richard S. Lazarus and Dr. Susan
Folkman’s transactional model of stress, published in 1984, remains one of the
most cited frameworks in psychology because it makes this claim empirically:
stress arises from an individual’s cognitive appraisal of a situation relative
to their perceived ability to cope with it, not from the stimulus in
isolation. Tuyen’s own life illustrated
the model directly. Her family moved
from Vietnam to France while she was still in primary school, and she was
initially reticent in an unfamiliar language and culture. As her mastery of French grew, her confidence
grew with it, eventually carrying her into a career as a lawyer. She has since moved to Singapore and is now
working on mastering English, applying the identical strategy that already
carried her across one language barrier to the next.
Passion with a Boundary Attached
Chaudhary spoke on following his passion
for electronics, and the challenges of working in a technical role inside a
trading house, where his specialism was not always the organisation’s central
priority. His advice ran counter to the
usual “follow your passion at all costs” cliché: pursue what interests you, but
keep time reserved for yourself regardless.
A passion pursued without boundary tends to consume the person pursuing
it, and Chaudhary’s caveat is the part most passion-driven advice conveniently
omits.
Truth, Perception, and an Old Parable
Nino Yap argued that truth is limited by
our perception, illustrating the point through the well-known parable of the
blind men and the elephant, each man’s description of the animal shaped by the single part he happened to touch. The parable’s most famous English rendering
comes from the American poet John Godfrey Saxe in the nineteenth century,
though its roots trace back further into South Asian religious and
philosophical tradition. Yap’s framing
centred on the distinction between absolute and relative truth, an old
philosophical fault line, and one no amount of confident assertion resolves on
its own.
A Reading from Poe
Sajeev Kumar read an extract from Edgar
Allan Poe’s Loss of Breath, a satirical short story first published in
1832 under the title A Decided Loss, in which the narrator loses the
physical ability to breathe partway through an argument with his wife and
spends the remainder of the tale attempting to survive without it. Reading Poe aloud in a Toastmasters meeting
is a bold choice. His prose was built
for the page, dense and ornate by modern standards, and delivering it aloud
with the pacing and gravity it demands is a harder exercise than reading a
contemporary passage written for the ear rather than the eye.
The Evaluators and Results
Ernie Khoo, Suresh, and Linda Zhang served
as Project Evaluators. Best Speaker went
to Tuyen. Best Evaluator went to
Suresh. Best Table Topics Speaker went
to a guest. A meeting spanning cognitive
psychology, ancient parable, career advice, and nineteenth-century American
gothic fiction within a single hour is not a small range for one club to cover
convincingly, and this one managed it without a single speech feeling out of
place beside the others.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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