The Walk of Life

My 1st speech at Toastmasters -

A very good afternoon to all of you!! I am here to present my first speech at Toastmasters, and what better way to do this than to introduce myself to all of you. Well, my story goes through a lot of name changes – it seems that the places I was associated with had unfashionable names, so their names had to be changed. In fact, these name changes make me feel totally confused.

So I’d like to start with something I’m very sure of, my name. My name is Sujata Rathi. Some people might say it’s not a fashionable name, but I’d point out to them that I’ve managed to get through 23 years of my life without changing it. I was born in a city called Calcutta, yes I know a lot of people will jump at me for not calling it “Kolkata” … but the fact is, when I was born, it was called Calcutta, and to me it still is. Anyways, I was born into a Marwari family, not the sort of family you see in Ekta Kapoor’s K-serials… Mine is a close-knit family of four, and apart from plotting and planning against each other, we do find time to help each other out in time of need :). My parents have always encouraged me to do the things I love and have taught me to always be optimistic. I also have a younger brother and we fight a lot, so there have been times when we’ve been locked into separate rooms, to increase the level of peace in the house. I have been brought up in Ranchi, a beautiful hill station which people recognize as soon as you say “you know Dhoni”? It used to be the summer capital of Bihar, and one fine day in 2000, it was suddenly a part of a new state called Jharkhand. But jokes apart, the competitive environment in the city was one of the main reasons for my clearing JEE and coming to the oldest IIT - IIT Kharagpur.

Kharagpur is a very small town. Its claim to fame is its 1072.5 m long platform, the longest railway platform in the world. Just imagine spending the four best years of your life in a town which is covered with houses resembling bhoot-banglas (or haunted houses), which houses all sorts of species you don’t want to get acquainted with, like snakes, frogs and insects. Sounds horrible, right? But truly, those were the four most enjoyable years of my life. There were lots of shady places to be explored in and around the campus. And because the college campus was the best hangout in the town, the students spent a lot of time with each other. The extra-curriculars were great, and the inter-hostel competitions were matters of life-and-death. People came down to blows for their hostels. Of course, being in a campus which had a male-female ratio of about 30:1 ensured that we were always in the thick of things, whether we liked it or not.

But all good things must come to an end, so even this roller-coaster ride had to. The life at IIT Kharagpur equipped us to handle big challenges, so here I am, handling the challenges which PayPal throws up every day. It has been a great learning experience working here, raising bugs and tickets, harassing unsuspecting developers :). Moreover, staying at Chennai has equipped me with the skills to stay at any place – if I have been able to stay in Chennai for more than an year and a half, I guess I could go and live in Timbuktoo and learn a few words of their native language too. I have just one complaint from this place – and that is the way my name has been mauled here. Yes, I know Shakespeare said “What’s in a name”, but I’d say “everything”. That is my identity after all. You see, the problem is that in the north the syllable “TH” is pronounced as
THA. So when my name is spelt as SUJATHA, I end up thinking someone else is being addressed, not me. Every time I get a mail starting “Hi Sujatha”, Sujatha with a THA, my heart bleeds. I once accidentally sent a mail to a friend from my official email address, where my name is spelt with a THA, and you can imagine how many jokes were cracked in my friend circle at my expense.

There’s one more thing I’d like to tell about myself. I love people. I don’t mean to say that you would find me hobnobbing with people I don’t know, or that you’d find me jumping out of joy because I’m in a crowded street. I just mean to say that I truly care about people around me. Their suffering pains me. And what pains me even more is when we human beings generate all this suffering. I wish we could get over our insecurities, the threat we perceive in other regions, religions, castes and their cultures. I wish we could start taking pride in our culture and recognize that our culture is too strong to be affected by anything, and that we would realize that living in harmony is the only way forward. After all as someone said, “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.”