Ice breaker speech (My first speech at Toastmasters Club)
Respected Toastmaster, ladies and gentleman good evening!
The Turks from Azerbaijan can’t pronounce the sound “K”. They pronounce “K” as “Ch”. For example they call Pakistan as Pachistan and this aspect of Azerbaijani Turks were a source of amusement for fifth graders. Our science teacher was an Azerbaijani Turk and students were listening carefully to him and were making fun of them after class by repeating his words. This Turkish teacher attracted me. Unlike my class fellows I didn’t attracted to his pronunciation but to his world perspective.
I was busy sketching that a voice made me come out of myself, “What are you creating Khudadad?” It was my Turkish teacher that was looking to my sketch for long but I didn’t notice him until he didn’t ask me. I was speechless at the moment but he liked my sketches. I was always hiding my sketches from my teachers because they were always either too abstract or they were just caricatures. The word, “creating” from my Turkish teacher, the same teacher who all making fun of him, had changed my perspective about myself.
I was no more an individual to fit in anything. I was always wanted to change everything by recreating them. I was always in hot debates with my friends on every subject. I remember a debate that we had on theory of relativity. We didn’t realize that our discussion is so loud that our it is disturbing the conversations of other people around us. A young student came to us and while putting both of his palms together requested us, “Sir! Please let theory of relativity live one more day. Don’t kill it today.” We laughed and ended our discussion. The closest among my likeminded friends was my youngest uncle. We were mining gypsum from near mountain to make clays for our models. We built a small furnace to melt down aluminum and plastic to create our models. We were making casts from different materials to pour into our molds. We were wandering around markets of spare parts and second hand tools for suitable parts into our designs. We were trying to recreate everything from clothing to buildings to sports to philosophy to whole society. We want to change everything and every potential idea was attracting us. We piled up large and diversified range of books on different topics from philosophy to rocket science. Certainly we liked and moved by personalities some of whom people don’t like great Khan Genghis Khan, Lenin, Mao, Socrates, Dr Iqbal, Mir Damad, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Lincoln, Henry Ford, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin. We liked these personalities because they were revolutionary figures in their disciplines and areas irrespective of the results and impacts of their struggles.
As we were doing our experiments, reading and debating we realized that, it is not easy to recreate everything as we were thinking so I started to change my attention from sketching and making models to philosophy. Playing with ideas was relatively easy so I started to create my own philosophy and it was the dividing lines between me and my friends. I did not know as we were growing our interests were also diverging and more than that we were selecting different fields. I chose geology and my friends’ chemistry. I became Science teacher and then lecturer of Geology and again changed my subject to paleobiology. The result of this all struggle came up in form of a book and two more books that I will publish them in summer.
Ladies and gentle man!
There were a lot of individuals who influenced me in different manners but four men in human history influenced more than others. I am influenced by commitment of Socrates to truth, by commitment of Genghis Khan to his people, by commitment Einstein to imaginations and by commitment of Charles Darwin to nature. It is me Khudadad, Laugh please.......................
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