On an auspicious Friday afternoon, while people were enjoying their weekend, the Toastmasters clubs of Bangladesh gathered under the roof of North South University to celebrate an important day: the inter-club competition, “Toastmasters Area K5 Humorous and Evaluation Speech Contest 2017”, hosted by North South University Toastmasters Club. The event kicked off at 2:30 p.m. with a small panel discussion moderated by Rokhsana Akhter Rupee, the theme being leadership and communication. The discussion raised a number of insightful questions from the audience which were addressed to the panel.
Soon followed the much awaited event of the day- constestants giving speech from their respective clubs. This session was conducted by Mohammad Habibul Islam, Area Director of District 41 Toastmasters. A lucky-draw decided the chronological order of speakers as to who’d go first and who’d go last. There were three humorous speeches which made the auditorium guffaw with laughter. A prepared speech was delivered by a fellow Toastmaster and the next three speakers, the evaluators, evaluated the speech, which was the other part of the competition.
The third session involved a demo-meeting which demonstrated to the audience how regular Toastmaster meetings take place. It included a prepared speech, evaluations and a Table-Topic round where three guest speakers are allowed to pick a blind-slip with a topic and speak on it for at least a minute.
Sandeep Raturi, Program Quality Director of District 41, gave a short speech regarding the roles of Toastmasters during meetings and the Do’s and Don’ts of evaluation which was highly inspiring and informative. Moreover he proudly mentioned that District 41, which includes northern and eastern states of India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, has recently been ranked the number one district among all the Toastmasters Districts.
At the end of the eventful evening, Ashhab Manzoor won first prize for of the Evaluation Speech Contest and Md Salam Bin Shawkat won first prize for the Humorous Speech Contest, both from North South University Toastmasters club. Nafees Kausar, from Dhaka Toastmasters club, won the runner up prize for both the contests. The duo of North South University Toastmasters Club will go on to represent Area K5, Bangladesh, at the division k5 level contest in Kolkata in October 2017. The final competition is at the district 41 level, which will be held in New Delhi in November 2017.