Audience Questions

I am talking academic events. Most of these claim they have time for a Q and A, with Q being audience questions. The problem is that speakers don't finish in the time allotted, so the questions remain un-questioned, so to speak.  

To be fair, not all questions that do get asked are great. Most are boringly predictable, and answered with lack of imagination. Anyway, it satisfies the questioner's thirst for knowledge, and the answerer's chance to be all-knowing.. or appear to be.

If there's a panel discussion, you can be sure that most will end up being a series of talks. The setup for the Powerpoints eats up a lot of time, and yes, the Questions are given 5-7 minutes, depending on how far lunch is. 

The Question is, what is the best way to get good questions. Maybe the speaker can build his own questions and answer them too.

Citizenship

 Not sure if I am a citizen anymore. I had a passport, but someone in the Ministry of External Affairs just said it doesn't prove I am a citizen. 

Well, maybe the fact that we are a part of the Universe is enough. It makes us a universal or global citizen. If only Trump, Starmer (or whoever is the next PM there), and other world leaders understood this. 

I do have an Aadhar card, but I am without any support (Aadhar) when it comes to proving my credentials. 

I have kids and they were born here in India. Are they citizens? Not sure anymore, the way things are going.

Anyway, when I know more, I will let you know. Till then, let's imagine a floating citizenship for ourselves.

Guest Lectures and Invited Lectures

 These are different from regular teaching that might stretch over 30-45 sessions. Therefore, you can approach it differently.

Create interest by either asking a question or have a good first slide. I tried it with a dummy visiting card created with Canva in one of my invited sessions. I included two or three different photographs, chosen for their impact, to create the card.

I used it at the Calicut Management Association invited talk..

Know your audience, and what makes them tick. Most people don't want a long discourse with you giving gyaan. Instead, share interesting experiences and leave the lesson to be drawn out by the audience. 

Thank the people who invited you. But for them, you wouldn't be there.

Use the board, if there is one. It creates interest.. 

If you can ask questions, even if rhetorical, it breaks the monotony. It can be a poll, where people have to raise hands to agree..

If it's a class of students, give them a small group task. Usually works..

Stick to the time given.

You Have Been Teaching Too Long When...

You know what excuse the student will come up with before he uses it..you get good at predictive analytics, in today's lingo.

You are no longer wondering what will keep the students engaged in class-you KNOW. At least, you know the reverse-what will NOT keep them engaged in class..

You stop telling them tales of how great your school, college days were..because (see above).

You start mentally grading a question that someone has asked, as soon as he has asked it.

You have five (or more) final exams potentially ready, and you just have to decide which one to use.

You know what used to be an easy question once may be a tough question today. :)

Things Which Keep Us Awake

Things which keep us awake -in my view, after extensive research- are the following.

Kids

Will I get batting tomorrow in the game we play every day?

Will my teacher ask for the home work or forget it?

Teens

How many Likes will my selfie get?

Women

What do I wear?

Housewives

What do I cook tomorrow?

Gentlemen (gentle is just a figure of speech)

Where will my next beer come from?

Will I get to watch India play XYZ undisturbed?

Of retreads and reincarnation

Post-this post, I might retire. Because I am like the post office-outdated. No, that does not mean I don't get dates. Fortunately, there are still friends who humour me for an evening at a pub or a restaurant.

What I mean is, I am feeling a bit tired. Now, a tyre can be re-treaded, but can a tired soul be? Only if it comes back in a full body in a re-incarnation, I suppose. On similar lines, can a retard be re-treaded?

That brings me to an important question. Does a tyre ever retire? Or does it continue to tread fearlessly where no tyre has gone before it?

Other important questions that I face are-

Does a homily cause the end of bonhomie?

Does a ghost-writer live on after his death?

Is playing caste politics a castly mistake, in the wake of recent election results?

Can you call a guy who bombs Syria an ASS-yrian?

Can a bird use a Nom-de-plume?

Why

Why bad news sells...because people want to explore the limits of their innate goodness

Why Godmen succeed...because we fail to see the God within us, and the Godman knows this too well.

Why economies go through a crisis..because a roller-coaster is more fun than a flat growth of whatever percentage..

Why we make a remake (Zanjeer is the latest)...because it takes too much effort to think of a fresh story.

Why song credits on most TV and radio shows don't include the lyric writer or music director these days..because the anchors think the songs dropped in from heaven or from the lips of movie stars.

Why songs from the sixties or seventies sound better than those from 2013..because they were.

Why do we watch TV, also known as the idiot box? Because we are...yeah, you got it!

Questions That Will Shake up the Status Quo

As usual, the questions are all-important, potentially earth-shaking.

1. Can a Tunisian singer ever sing out of tune?

2. Are you being mean to a guest if you feed him Kari - Meen ( a Kerala fish dish)?

3. How does a news anchor (Arnab is not the only one) pull off a thirty-minute show with a single news item that could have been summed up in thirty seconds? Do they send them to the School of Elongation/Extrusion? Or do they watch episodes of Ramayan to learn this trick?

4. Why do you need cricket commentators when the viewer can watch everything from five different angles? And a related question- are we going to have live commentary with wedding videos soon?

Questions, Questions

If you sit in a mall and mull over something, are you mulling or malling? Extension: If you wear a mulmul ka kurta while doing so, what happens?

Why does a dentist not repair dents?

Why does a carpenter not paint cars?

Why is a hood not required in a brotherhood?

When your relationship runs out of spice, can it be a case of Humdum (Hindi/Urdu) turning humdrum?

Why would a wife want the same husband for the next few lives? (logically, at most one life should suffice)

Who pops the question in a gay marriage?

Is Goli wada pav a 'deadly' brand name?

If someone falls over his shopping cart, is he Flipkarting?

If an idle mind is the Devil's workshop, where are the products from a zillion years of idle men?

An idle mind produces some blogs, too.

Earth-shaking Queries

I have a few grave questions that need answering-

1. Are Mentos the favoured brand that mentors chew on?

2. Which are the pens favoured by writers in a 'pen'sive mood?

3. If an emerging economy performs 'sub'-par, does it become a sub-merging economy?

4. Can a Gupt-a keep a secret better than a Khulla-r?

5. Who invented the spelling of Albuquerque (a town in New Mexico, USA), and why?

6. What is the second-commonest name after Smith?

7. How do you convert a Pande into a Deshpande?

You are welcome to answer some or all of these. Or raise a few of your own, that you were afraid to ask.

Presentation Skills

These are the most important set of skills a person may possess or acquire in life, in my humble view (just avoiding IMHO, the cliche). Why? It can change you from a hero to a zero, or vice-versa, in a jiffy. I have come to this wonderful conclusion about the human condition (might get nominated for a Nobel sometime), after sitting through a bunch of presentations at a conference where educated people, some faculty and some students, presented their research papers.

I have no quarrel with content that was presented, but I do have one with the way it was presented. Most speakers did not seem to have a clue as to how long they were taking. This was compounded by a laissez- faire chairperson, who allowed them to drift aimlessly from slide to slide (oh, what a slide it was, too).

Anyway, there were horrendous (egregious? maybe I still remember how to spell this, after all) errors of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, editing and the like on many of the slides and articulation of those. The central idea of the 10-15 minute presentation was not clear to the audience even at the end.

Is it so difficult to present a few ideas or thoughts or report on what you tried to do and achieved? I think not, but it needs you to think from the other's-the audience's-point of view. We are so full of ourselves that we as speakers neglect the audience. We have no idea of their needs, and make it so one-sided that it puts people off. Structuring a thought or two into a slide so that the audience gets a gist, should be the objective. Stringing the slides together for coherence should be the second objective. Editing it after it is done should be a matter of course.

Asking questions is another art that I will pontificate on some other time. The manner of doing it is just too rude in many conferences.