My First Speech In ToastMasters

Mr/Ms Toastmaster, fellow toastmaster and guests.

Good Evening.

I do not know whether the speech should have a name or not. The title of my speech is "The identity"

My name is Pankaj Goyal. I got my independence in this world in just a day before all of us got our independence. Can anyone guess my date of birth ? Yes he/she got it right I was born on 14 Aug. I was born on 14^th Aug in 1981 in Delhi; a place u all must be familiar with. Sorry but I don’t remember anything about the first two or three years of my life but interestingly I still remember the first day of my nursery school. I went to school with my elder brother and I refused to sit away from brother. The teacher wanted me to move to my class but I refused to go. She try to give me chocolates / candies etc but not able to convince me. She also tried to force me but I started crying that I will sit with my brother in his class. For the first few days I sit in my brother’s class and then my parent were called to school and finally I started sitting in my class. For the first 5 years I was an ordinary child in the school. Now I will tell you about the day I got enlightenment. I was setting in an award ceremony and looking at the people receiving awards. I was tired of clapping for the people receiving award. Then I thought that from next year I have to be there to receive the award. After that I never looked back and I was always the first ranker in my class. This becomes my compulsion to be first in the class. In fact I started enjoying being first in the class.

After this very successful school life I started my college life from NSIT. This is the first time when I suffered an identity crisis. People do not know about the college and we used to give them the reference of DCE and how NSIT is related to DCE. Etc College life was full of fun and entertainment and a new Pankaj was born. I will never forget those days of my life.

After passing from college I have several offers. I choose STMicroelectronics from them as that was the best paying company among the entire 4 offer I had. The working in the ST was really a fun. But your social life is never easy if you are working in ST. When people used to ask what your company do. Initially I used to tell them the innocently that I work in a chip manufacturing company. And they used to ask me why you are working in a chips company. This was kind of second identity crisis.

After working there for about 2 year I switched to Cadence. I worked there for more than 2 years. There also I faced some identity issue. Some of you might know that Cadence develop software tools for chip designing. But when u tells someone about the tools he/she conjure a image of mechanical tools made of metals and all. And it was always difficult to explain the difference bw normal tools and sw tools.

Thank God that now after joining Adobe I do not face such type of identity problems as most of the people know about Photoshop, flash and Pdf etc.

About my interests. I like traveling. One of the most interesting things about travelling that I like to travel to different places. I have been to lot of hill stations with my friends. I have been to Shimla, Manali, Nanital, agra, Goa, Jaipur, Udaipur, mount Abu, Dharmshala etc. BTW if any one of you is planning to go any of these places you are welcome to consult me. I will provide you free consultancy :-) . Another thing which I want to tell you that I want to learn new things. When In cadence I learned Salsa. I am learning Guitar playing now.

Democracy, In India ??

Are we living in a democratic country ?
If I go outside my house and ask anybody this question, the answere I will get is most probabily will be - ofcourse we are living in a democratic country. The person whom I ask quesion will perhaps might say that dont you know that recently .7BN people voted in the general election. India is the largest democracy in the world.And they might also point me out some of the history of indian democracy as well.

But when I see some of the events happening around us , specially election , I am bound to think the real meaning of the democracy. One of the incident I would like to point is related to Mamata madam. She won by a very good marging in west bangal and she also put an end to the Red fort of Bangal. But her request to the prime minister to cancle out the Buddhadev state goverment is very surprising. The budda government has won the election and they are in the power because of the people on west bangal has choosen his party. But after coming in the centre the mamata madam thinks that she has got the complete power and do anything.

Second incident is also related to one of the most sophasticated lady in indian politics whom we call behan ji will lots of love. She was looking for the prime minister position before the election. Now her party has got very less number of seats than she expected. This frustrated her a lot and she tranfered the 10 IPS and 27 IAS officers from the areas in which her party lost election.


Now the irony is that no one can object to her decision and everyone knows very well why she has done that. Now see that we all know that what she has done is wrong but even in the democracy we are helplessly see what she is doing.

I just remember one more incident where behan ji did something totally against the democracy. She imposed National security law on varun gandhi. Everybody knew that varun is not doing something greate or rather he is not doing right things. But national security law was completely in bad spirit of democracy.


At this moment of time, I am not able to suggest of think about any solution to these problems but I am sure there is a way to stop this kind of autocratic people and damaging the democracy. I will post the solution(in my point of view) as soon as I found one.

Greenathon

Yesterday I attended the Greenathon(The Yamuna Clean up Drive). The Drive is organized by Swechha(an NGO) with the help of some sponsors like NDTV, Toyota etc. The puspose of the drive was to organize a camp where people volunteer themselves to
clean the yamuna. I went to the place called Kudesiya ghat near ISBT to do my bit of contribution towards the cleaning of the Yamuna. I was very much happy to see the young guys gather there to clean up the river. The enthusiasm on the people was unlimited. Every one was giving its best to do something to clean the river. The NDTV seems to be the main organizer of the event. They were handling the cloves, plastic boots and shovels etc to the people for the clean up drive.
There were few points which came to my mind though.So many people put their efforts to clean the river but definitely after some day the same situation will come. The river will be filled with the plastic bags, flowers, cloths and other kind of stuff. We need to address the root cause of the problem. The people should be made aware about the importance of the river to the existence of the Delhi people. People should be feel obliged towards the river and think twice before throwing anything in the river. One more thing which I thought is that the purpose of the Greenathon drive is to clean the yamuna and in a sense make our environment better. But by using the so much plastic in the form of gloves and boots will more harm the environment than the work done by all of us to clean the Yamuna. Furthermore a bulldozer the equivalent amount of work, done by all of us in 24 hrs, in just few minutes. So we need to think of involving technology in cleaning drive and should educate people about their responsibility to make these kind of drives effective.

What a Slumdog !!!

Yesterday I saw the movie slumdog millionaire. I liked it very much. What a amazing concept and outstanding story. I liked the performance of Dev Patel very much. But after watching the movie,I saw the interview of Dev with Masand on CNBC tv18. I was a enthralled to know that the movie is made by a director who is not an Indian but the location and picturization of the movie is still awesome. There is one more thing which I came to know during the interview of Dev is that this is his first trip to India and he did not speak Hindi at all. But still he did the job of a Slumdog in a magnificent manner. No one can believe after seeing the movie that this person is not raised in India and He do not know anything about India and do not speak Hindi at all.
There are somethings which can not be forgotten from the movie.
The love of Jalal for Latika. Jalal loved Latika so much that he did not think about anything while looking for her and he find her even in such adversities.
The passion of Jalal for Amitabh Bachachan. It is very difficult to find a person who loves a superstar so much that he would do the thing Jalal did for taking his autograph.
One of the noticable thing was the Memory of Jalal. He remember almost anything of his life.

But I was confused about one thing that why the character of Anil Kapoor is shown totaly opposite than that of Amitabh or Shahrukh in KBC. Both of them are totaly polite in their conversation with hot seat candidate of KBC. But in the film the Anil kapoor did leave a chance to let down Jamal.

Anyways it does not matter much to the film. The film is awesome.

The Day I felt Most Guilty

It was the day of my life when I felt very guilty about what I have done. It was one of the bad day of my life. The day started with the visit to a government department. I have to go to MTNL to submit my old modem to MTNL, as I had taken a new connection. The attitude of the MTNL people was very bad and I faced a lot of trouble in returning the modem and had to suffer a loss of 350 Rs too. I was very angry about all this incident.

I came home from MTNL office and parked my car outside the house as usual. After some time my neighbour came to home , holding a child of about 7-8 years old. She told me that this child is doing some drawing on my car. I run towards the car and saw that one side of the car( barely 6 month old) was scratched with some kind of pencil. I was so angry with the child that I could not think about anything else and did not understand what to do. I could not control myself and slap that child twice. Then my mother and I took that child to his home and asked his mother to keep her child in control and told her that you should know to handle your child etc etc. But everything was meaningless as nothing can be done now.

After coming to home I was very depressed at the condition of my new car. It was scratched all over on one side. I was about to weep , but controlled myself.

After the whole incident was over I was feeling guilty of slapping a child of such a small age. Though it was the mistake of child also but I could not convince myself that what I did was correct. I keep on thinking how can I revert the whole incident. Later in the evening I also inquired about the child. Thank fully he was alright.

I never felt so guilty in my life about what I have done.

Since a long time I was thinking to make a tool, which can be used to keep track of your expenses. But as always I am too lazy to start the new things. But finally someone has done it for me and that is what I am presenting today.

Today's website is

http://rudder.com/


This website help you to keep track of your expenses. You can easily manage your budget using this site.


Go give it a try.

In this series of interesting and different sites, today I am presenting another website

http://www.hassleme.co.uk/

This is a reminder site which keeps you reminding about your resolutions on random interval of time. This is an interesting site to use if you want to keep a resolution. Specially when the new year is coming this can be useful because this is the time when people make most of their resolutions.