Dear friends,
It's been a while (like 2-3 years!) since I last wrote a "last night's meeting..."
Last night's meeting was truly inspiring for me, to say the least. It also made me grateful for belonging to a club where the old and the new, the young and the old are in balance, like yin and yang. I knew more about our early days of independence last night.
KH Song was poised and organized as our TME, led us through the meeting nicely, kudos. Table topics session was fresh, the topics dished out by Victor Wan were general enough that the volunteers had ample room to share for 2mins.
Then, we had a ball with 3 wonderful speeches from Eunice Tan, Jitin and Julia Leong. You guys rocked, good sharing.
Eunice delivered her ice breaker, titled Hunger for Balance in Life. We got to know her a lot more. Hometown's Rawang, married, 3 kids, loves new age music and likes to travel. Her message, life's short, live it to the fullest.
Then, Jitin did his 5th project speech, An Idea can Change your Life. He never ceases to amaze me with his choice of things to speak about. An Idea is a fruit of our thinking. So, the next time an idea pops into your head, capture it, note it down. Do it everyday, you'll have 365 ideas by year end. And share it with people around you, fertilize them. You'll never know, you can be the next Bill Gates. *winks*
After that, Julia astounded us with her storytelling ability. She started her advanced storytelling manual with The Crystal Heart, a poignant Vietnamese folk tale. She had my attention the whole time, that's a thumbs up for you, Julia...it's been awhile since I listened attentively during our meetings.
Now, every GE who visits us always say nice things only. So, let me play the devil's advocate here...the meeting didn't start out well for me til we got to the speeches. The amount of grammatical errors I heard hurt my ears badly, no pun intended.
It's a really serious problem, guys. We really have to make a conscious effort to speak good English at club meetings, with good grammar, good enunciation. Not sure how many of you noticed, even our meeting agenda had an error... Malaysia celebrates its (there's no ' in its) independence.
So, perhaps for future improvement, here's some thoughts for future roleplayers:
1. President's speech can and should be uplifting, especially when we don't have invocation session.
2. Role players should prepare themselves, with a script, very necessary, especially if you speak beyond 2mins. It's annoying to hear grammatical errors in the simplest of things. eg, our young guest, Ian, corrected the table topics he was given tonight. I was truly embarrassed.
3. Future Grammarians, take note. It's recommended that we mention the person who gave us a good quote, phrase etc. Only the good stuff. No need to mention who said the bad stuff, be it grammatical error/ incorrect pronunciation (it's been mispronounced many times even after our dear friend, DTM Azmi graciously conducted a pronunciation/phonetics class with us, it's pronunciation, not pronounciation).
4. The word of the day should be related to the "Theme of day" and we should also try to use the positive and cheerful word to make the environment positive and cheerful.
Otherwise, kudos to our first time diligent ah counter, Daniel Schwartz (he counted ah in people who usually got none, cool) and timekeeper, Fui Lien (precise reporting).
Please save this date:
*Sat, 4th Sept. Area G1 Humorous Speech & Evaluation Contests. MCOBA Building, Penthouse on 4th Flr. Jln Syed Putra. You can see the building on Federal Highway, after Kuen Cheng school if you are coming from KL.
That's all my ramblings for now,
cheers,
huey yee
