From a Powerful Speach to Speaking Slowly

From squidoo.com

Anna has had a couple of good weeks.  He has not had too many vivid disturbing dreams, there have been only a couple of hallucination / delusion instances, he is walking more, talking more, being far more insightful, joking and laughing with us. Tho' all this makes me more happy, there is also the fear & dread that soon he will have a hallucination that will contrast dramatically with these couple of good weeks.  And I kind-of feel guilty, feeling this way.

I know that it is inevitable & that there will soon be bad days.  But not now.  Not today. Not the last couple of weeks.  So, world, you can huff and puff with all your might later, for now, I am going to look at only the bright side.

Here is what happened this morning, when I went to have my customary early morning coffee with Anna. He told me about his first trip overseas, that too as a speaker at a conference.

In 1964, Anna was sent by the GOI to attend and present at a conference in Copenhagen. Anna's area of expertise was small scale industries. He made a presentation (more a speach) in front of his first international audience.  When he finished, he got a nice round of applause.

Powerfull speach from engl220-iliad-books-ixxiv-3-638

On returning to his seat, a Nordic gentleman, who he had been sitting next to him said, "A very powerful speach, Mr. Murthi". 

Anna smiled, graciously, and  said "Thank You", feeling very proud.

Till.......

The gentleman asked, "But what did you really say?"

Anna and I both laughed out loud.

He went on to tell me that over the duration of the conference, he realized that he needed to speak slowly to enable the interpreter to translate what he was saying.

So in preparation for the next conference (somewhere in Finland), he practiced speaking slowly. But, at the next conference, he spoke so slowly that the interpreter had to interrupt his speach to ask him to speak faster. Which he did.

Body Language from Online-Therepy.com

Anna's take?

You can prepare all you want. But, something will happen that you are not prepared for, and you need to learn and change fast.