I have always admired people who are good public speakers. I have great respect for them. I think it requires a great deal of confidence to express your thoughts in an emphatic and clear way. It requires a lot of spontaneity to deal with situations and answer questions with tact.

I have always been a very bad speaker. You know already that I am not good at all with words. In school and college, I used to look at my classmates when they stood on the stage and participated in debate competitions. I also wanted to be one of them.

Once I mustered some courage and participated; but my performance only brought my morale down. I remember going to my mom teary eyed and recounting the horror. She patted my back and told me that not everyone can do everything. After that I never even thought about approaching the stage. I was always the audience who clapped when the debate ended.

I completely forgot about it when one day my daughter came back home crying. She told me how she had participated in a poem reciting competition and she had forgotten her lines on stage. Everybody in the school made fun of her. I don’t know why but I didn’t repeat the line which my mother had told me years ago. I felt a very strong determination to change the things. From that day I started teaching my daughter how to speak her lines.

I admit I am not the right teacher. I have never myself spoken even a single line on stage but I have innumerable times listened people speaking. We both worked hard. Me and my daughter would repeat the lines again and again. We would work on our pronunciation, on the words that needed to be emphasized. Every night, before going to bed, my daughter would recite a new poem to me. It became a habit that we followed for many years.

I strongly believe that parents should take care of their kid’s overall development. A small child is like clay which will mould into any shape that you will work upon. Children are very tender and sensitive- their little hearts, their innocence- everything is precious. I wish every child grows up to be secure and confident. Not like me at all.

But now I have to leave. I have to attend a function at my daughter’s school today. Please take care. Bye.

The school function was actually a debate competition in which the common man’s daughter participated and won the first prize. She went on stage and accepted her award gracefully .There was one man in the audience who clapped the most.  It was the “common man”.