Speech is Silver

I am not exactly known for my public speaking skills but it came as a surprise to many (including myself) that I was not too bad at it as recent experiences reveal. Of late I’ve been addressing gatherings of more than hundred people and succeeding in having their attention for more than a couple of hours. This could classify as a major event in my decade and half’s experience in the government. As someone who works with farmers I am expected to have some skills in persuading them to adopt practices to improve their yields. However, all along I was doing it in a rather informal manner. There were only a handful of occasions in the past when I had to speak to an audience larger than that can fit in a car. I somehow managed to squeak through without embarrassing anyone. But now things have changed. I have realized that giving talks to farmers’ gatherings is not a joke. One needs different types of skills, skills that I am picking up slowly.

Before I got my promotion I was in the head office where I assumed there was no danger of being asked to give talks to anyone. But I was wrong. My bosses delegated to me their responsibility of giving talks on the subject I handle to trainees at a training institution. At first I was rather nervous but after I discovered that the trainees too were officers like me I was able to cope with it. I was giving talks at the rate of two a month and the trainees varied in number and type. Whenever there was a batch of them who were junior to me I tried to pepper the talks with humor, the kind that involved poking fun at the bosses. I had to make those sorts of jokes because agriculture, the subject I deal with, doesn’t yield much humor. Sometimes they got the jokes and sometimes they did not but I was not very concerned. It was a sort of learning experience for me.

After the promotion and the posting to a training institution in a different town I discovered I had to give more talks than even politicians. On an average I give talks to gatherings that exceed fifty people at the rate of two every week. Farmers are totally different from your average man on the street. It needs a special kind of skill to speak to them. It needs more specialized skills (not to mention experience) to convince them to try something new. One gets unnerved facing a crowd of men with passive faces who listen to you silently. It made me extra nervous because Telugu is something I am not good at. So apart from the language, the subject too was a hurdle because all the agriculture I know is from books whereas the farmers do it in the field. It sometimes gets tricky but call it graciousness or whatever, the farmers do not point out your mistakes. They simply bring it to your attention in a different way. After about half a dozen such meetings, I’ve started feeling comfortable but not so comfortable enough to face larger gatherings.

Since the past month, once a week I am giving talks to more than hundred progressive farmers at a time. My colleague who is more experienced than me accompanies me to a different town where the trainings are held. He begins the meeting with a brief talk and later I take over. I speak for about an hour and half on a topic that is relatively simple. I had four such meetings and all of them went off smoothly. Last week my colleague was absent so it fell on me to engage the gathering for the whole day which was a bit difficult. But it was a learning experience. I learnt to involve the farmers too by having short quizzes, asking them to read something and generally pitting one group against the other in quizzes and other such tasks. Somehow the day passed and the training session came to an end. I was glad for the experience taught me something new about facing large gatherings of farmers.