Public Speaking in English

*Disclaimer: You won’t learn anything about public speaking in English from this blog.

Public Speaking is an art that can be learned. I definitely have improved over the years although I am by no means good at it. But every step is another step and it’s all good so I’m not complaining.

I learned public speaking at school. My first experience of it was back in Sacred Heart School Lunglei where they always made students handle Morning Assembly – a poem, bible reading, praying, etc. It taught us how to address an audience. It also taught me Ozymandias by P B Shelley which I still can recite to this day. Neat.

I never volunteered but over the course of my school life, there were multiple occasions where I stood in front of a bunch of people and spoke. A lot of it was gospel. As bad in public speaking as I was, I was chapel-in-charge at one point and I even played guitar in public then. The cringe. Or as church members would say, the Lord is never short of instruments (will make do if He can’t find one!).

I was extremely nervous the first time I spoke in Mizo in public. And it was a lecture, of all things. I was championing New Pension Scheme at the time and Bernie, Sawmtea and I had divided the course into three parts. I was hilariously bad at it but I was also leader so I couldn’t exactly not perform. Sometimes I’d start a sentence and not know how to end it and would just stand silently, heart thundering. I was bad at it in English and I had training in it; I had zero training in Mizo. Ugh. That was a bad experience. But I grew from it and I suppose I am grateful for it.

More opportunities developed for Mizo public speaking for me in time. I even publicly translated for my old DC Dr Aggarwal sometimes which was always a challenge because as a science guy, he often used science-y words. And we have very few science words in Mizo. You talk about photosynthesis and Mizo is stumped. We came up with a system where he prepared his speech beforehand or he told me the general gist and I’d mentally search for appropriate Mizo words. Anyhoo. I guess it worked. No one complained. Either that, or nobody listened.

As I was gaining confidence in Mizo public speaking, suddenly this week I found myself thrust into English public speech again. I rolled my eyes and my sleeves and performed. Because as much as it disconcerted me to speak in English after years of Mizo speaking again, I came into an epiphany which was that it didn’t matter all that much. Possibly 90% of the time, if people do comment on you, they’d comment on your accent. Not your grammar, not your material. And comments on accent I can deal with.

English is not my native language. I can only imitate what I’ve heard. And what I’ve heard and mimicked is a hotpot of choice accents – Kerala nuns, North Indians, UK and US films and of course, my own mother tongue. So yes, it was always going to be a jumble of all of these swirled together. And I won’t pronounce some words properly which is still okay because I’ve learned words in books – like quay. Not until the 2012 Doctor Who ep. The Angels Take Manhattan did I realise it was pronounced more like Key than Kway! Or that yatch does not require the ch to be pronounced because it’s not sounded out anyway. And that’s English words; in Irish, it becomes even more complicated like how in the world is Eoghan pronounced Owen, or Siobhan pronounced as She-von? I learned all these pronunciations from the screen, mind. So however and in whatever context I use them have to be influenced by what I’ve heard. My accent is therefore the least of my concerns and least cause of anxiety.

I always say you should not be too worried about English and how good or bad you are at it. It is good to improve because it very much is the medium through which a lot of us have experienced the wider world. Any gain in traction can only lead to better understanding and appreciation of literature, the arts and the sciences. Possibly commerce too. But otherwise, it is still a colonial hangover to judge people on how well they know the language.

Bottom line is people probably aren’t paying that much attention to you very much anyway so it’s OK!