CC1 - Ice Breaker - The Way Forward

As Obama said “Yes we can, yes we will do”, I say “Yes I can, yes I will do” – My journey has started with Toastmasters with Sundararaman as my mentor at Medleys and all of you have gathered this evening  to listen to my CC#1 Ice Breaker – The Way Forward.

Very Good Evening TMOD and fellow Toast Masters.

The toastmaster’s manual says “Speaking about your self is the easiest thing to do”. However, when I started to prepare for my Ice breaker speech for 4 to 6 minutes I found that it is too short a time and have realized that “It is not that easy to talk about myself”. With humble beginning I will briefly introduce myself and share some of my experiences … Very aptly Zig Ziglar said – “You don’t have to be GREAT to START, but you have to START to be GREAT and this is where I START.

I was born in a small village beside river Godavari in the state of Andhra Pradesh with two younger sisters. Mother is a home maker and father an Electrical Engineer in State Electricity Board and during his service toured across Andhra Pradesh. I have done my schooling in Hyderabad and then moved to Bangalore for rest of my education in Bangalore University for my Bachelors and post-graduation.  After my education I have chosen teaching as my 1^st profession for +2 Physics and after more than a decade as 1^st inflection point I moved from teaching profession to software. From programmer in software moved to Quality and CMM implementation along with ISO and currently on the Management side as a Senior Project Manager at Tech Mahindra. During this path in my career I have toured across India and also been to Thailand and United States.

All through my life apart from my studies during education and work during my employment I have spent the balance time clicking the shutter right from the Black & White days to the DSLR age all the colours of life.

During the collage days as a budding photographer I learnt developing and processing of the black and white film and also printing the photographs through the projector in the Physics Lab. As the days passed by I got myself better cameras. This was the time where I have experimented both on the Black & White as well as colour photography extensively.

With the dawn of the internet age I have upgraded equipment to DSLR. At this stage in 2009 as the 2^nd inflection point I have it I started posting my pictures on the Web on Flickr with the Brand Name Photographic Collection, today I have lot of visitors daily visiting my website on Flickr. As on date I have some of my photographs selected for display in the exhibitions, requested to be placed on websites and have even got some auctioned.  Today I take every opportunity to cover events to my heart’s content.

A very important point not to be forgotten is I have had neither mentor nor teacher in Photography, I had learnt all by myself with the release of each shutter.

One of my goals right from my childhood was to be a Professional Photographer. Hopefully, I’ll achieve that in the near future. It is this again which taught me as Zig Ziglar said that “You don’t have to be GREAT to START, but you have to START to be GREAT”.

With this I hand over to TMOD.