Gavels Club Newsletter Issue 14 .pdf

GAVELS CLUB PULSE NEWSLETTER

CONTENTS
Knowledge and Celebration – TM Seetha Sagaran ....................................................................................... 2
Message from the President – Aryan Shah ................................................................................................... 4
The Path not taken – Kevin Thomas............................................................................................................... 6
Hello Ms. Green – Saniya Udesh .................................................................................................................... 8
Guide to your Icebreaker Speech – Aryan Wadhwani ................................................................................10
The Smart and the Sound – Aryaman Tepal ................................................................................................11
Mental Health – Ishrat Kahlon......................................................................................................................12
Delicious – Prakhar Gupta ............................................................................................................................14
Being who you are – Lynn Aranha ................................................................................................................15
Just a will needed – Tanish ...........................................................................................................................16
Anthony Horowitz – Eshaan Kahlon .............................................................................................................17
Winter’s Laugh– Isha K Lingawar..................................................................................................................18
Multiple Personalities – Prithvi Mulki ..........................................................................................................19
Fighting Blind – Melissa Almeida ..................................................................................................................20
Never giving up – Shivani Bhosale................................................................................................................21
My view of a holiday – Sumayo Shankar......................................................................................................22
Are Cheat days helpful? – Meher Sebastian ................................................................................................23
Jokes- Preeti Rebastian .................................................................................................................................24
Jokes- Ananya and Catherine .......................................................................................................................25
Jokes- Maitri Bhadra .....................................................................................................................................26
Creative Corner- Praneel, Jay and Rishi .......................................................................................................27

For feedback and suggestions, please contact Aryan Wadhwani (Young Voices Gavel Club VP PR)

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Knowledge and Celebration – TM Seetha Sagaran
Most of our Gavel members just concluded their exams and
now look forward to the relaxing summer break.
Imagine if, instead of exams, acquiring knowledge meant
fun and celebration! Sounds impossible for most of you
right?
Recently in my Toastmaster Club, we had a sizzling debate
on the topic - "Most of formal education is a waste of time"
The learning opportunity for the debate participants was
not merely based through their arguments on the stance they had to take, but get
an insight into what education can mean in our lives.
Many seek to enhance the quality of life through the utilization of the creative
and literary pursuits in producing works that seek to promote the joy in diversity.
Knowledge gives us a gist of how vibrant our world is and how the myriad
shades of life seen from the perspective of different people from different cultural
backgrounds and nations can be source of pleasure to a reader.
From an educational perspective, continuous learning enables you to face the
challenge of learning something new and unknown. Along with physical
exercise, mental exercise is crucial for our overall health and well-being. This
fact is not just incredible from the impact of knowledge on our health and

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well-being, it is also acknowledging that learning positively enhances our life in
all possible ways.
Being part of Gavel Club is highly recommended to those who enjoy the
companionship of children, learning and improving themselves. The Gavel
experience can be termed as an “intellectual celebration”.
Gavel members, do send us (Young Voices Gavel Club Support Team, Mr.Vinod,
Mr.Ramesh, Mr.Abdul and myself) your mails with your suggestions on how to
make the Gavel Club experience even more fun. We’d love to hear from you.

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Message from the President – Aryan Shah
Dear Gaveliers
It is a great pleasure to serve as the president of
this distinguished Young Voices Gavel Club
this year from 2017-2018. I would like to
thank everybody in our club for giving me this
opportunity and supporting me. I have been in
Young voices gavel club for around 4 years
now, and it has been a wonderful road, there
have been many obstacles, learning
opportunities and a lot of fun. Being a
president has helped me understand what
responsibility means and it has helped me
understand the value of team work. Over the years of my existence in the club I
have seen it grow magnificently in all directions. There has been a change in
every person in the club, people are taking up more roles and responsibilities in
the club which is helping them develop as people and it helps to improve their
character. Our club during the past 4 years has improved greatly in our variety of
speaking skills, table topics and evaluation speeches. There has been a very
evident growth in the skill level of my fellow gavels over the course of a few
years, Keep it up!!!

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Our club offers a supportive, caring, and friendly environment that helps
nurture public speakers and push them to new heights. This club helps various
different people who have all sorts of difficulties in communicating, raise
themselves through constructive verbal feedback. It helps gavels become more
confident, learn the art of persuasive and humorous techniques, and sets us up
for the big stage as confidant leaders and communicators. Our club celebrates
each speaker’s achievements and milestones with trophies and certificates.
Overall Young voices is a very effective club, as it helps inevitability helps
speakers develop into powerful, and confidant public speakers thought
constructive feedback and shows a very positive transformation. I hope that you
all continue to strive for the very best.
I would like to give a special thanks to toastmaster Seetha Sagaran,
Toastmasters Vinod Wariath and Toastmaster Abdul, for mentoring our club
and raising to new heights through constructive feedback.

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The Path not taken – Kevin Thomas
SAVERS ARE LOSERS. If you get 500 dollars every month any you save it, what good would that do? Saving
is not the way to go, however investing is. Although it may be extremely risky investing in something is 9
times more likely to give you the edge over other people.
Most people avoid taking risks and they just do the things which they already know how to do well. On
the other hand, as far as I am concerned the successful people are quite different in comparison to
ordinary people, they take risks and try new things in order to achieve their goals. For example, Columbus
is a man who tried to go to India by a different route and he unexpectedly discovered a continent. If he
took the ordinary path as other sailors he could not reach this great success. He took the path not taken.
Life is full of missed opportunities, where you knew you could have done something that might have
made a difference but you chose not to do it.
One of my main role models and someone who inspires me on a daily basis is Richard Branson. Having
read his auto-biography it shows how much this one man has achieved despite his difficult child hood and
disadvantages in life like dyslexia. This man has taken more risks in his life than the amount of times you
have pulled out a tissue from a box. Despite having more than 50 companies that has failed, the Virgin
group has become one of the largest conglomerates ever. This one man has never walked away from an
opportunity.
In his auto-biography he talks about the calculations involved in taking a risk. All you have to do is
calculate how much you will gain and possibly lose from that risk. From that it’s your decision if you want
to take that risk or not. Unfortunately, many a times it’s not as easy as two plus two.
There have been areas in Richard Branson’s life where the miscalculation of taking a risk has affected him
drastically by losing millions of dollars. But there have been times where the risk has paid off. One of
Richard’s most famous and successful risk was when one day when he needed to travel to the United
States for a crucial matter. Upon arriving at the airport the staff announced that all flights have been
cancelled that day due to insufficient pilots. That is when he decided to rent a small privatized plane and
hire an external pilot but since he did not have enough money at that time he noticed there were
numerous other passengers who wanted to go to US as well. Therefore, he took the risk of charging a
price for each seat on his 15 available seats on the chartered plane. To his surprise all the passengers
agreed to it and wanted to come along. Richard even got to mark-up the price of each seat due to the
demand. That was the beginning of Virgin Atlantic for Richard Branson. A risk that eventually paid off,
many times over. He also was consistent on taking the path not taken.
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Furthermore, there have been times where my colleagues and I have also failed in taking risks. For
instance, when we were learning about matrices in school and I frankly did not see how learning such a
pointless thing would benefit me in my future. Therefore, in aims to kick matrices off the IGCSE syllabus
raising my hand up, I said these exact words to my math teacher “miss, how and what purpose would
matrices serve me in my future”. The class suddenly went into complete silence with a few giggles here
and there. I was thinking to myself that this risk was definitely not worth it. My math teacher on the
other hand was even more confused and was planning a strategic way to tackle this table topic question.
After a few minutes she made up something on the spot and said it to me. But I knew in my head that all
she was saying was that matrices are on the syllabus, therefore she had to teach it to us. That day I got an
email sent home to my parents from the teacher followed by a few detentions. I truly hope that me
sharing this dreadful experience explains how important the calculation is when taking a risk.
Now I am not trying to tell you guys to go out there in the real world and start up your own company and
drop out of school. What I am trying to say is that try something new once a while and take risks here and
there. After all, you will only learn and gain knowledge and experience from each failure that you take on.
I once asked a wise man one day as to what was the biggest risk that he has ever taken and to my
astonishment he said the biggest risk is not taking risks at all.
Therefore, I want all of you to take risks and the scarier the better, it can be as simple as doing all 4
contests in the next competition or raising your hand up when a table topics volunteer is required. If you
want use the risk formula and most of the time there is only a little you will lose compared to the benefits
you will receive by taking that risk. So all I would like to say is that if you don’t invest in yourself and in
your time then you will be living a life in someone else’s shoes. Most people take their ideas to their
graveyards with them I don’t want you to be that person. All I want from you is to thrive the path that is
not taken

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Hello Ms. Green – Saniya Udesh
My life is currently fulfilling, uncomplicated and happy. I have a fresh set of friends. And just to put light
on who these new friends are, I am having extremely rewarding conversations with plants, who are,
without a shadow of doubt in my mind, females. Here’s how.
They can be slender or thick but they are beautiful and strong, they bloom when looked after and wither
and die when neglected. Oh, and one more thing, they seem dreadfully complicated.
When it comes to plants you would think a simple gardening site should be able to do it for you. In fact I
always believed that you don’t even need that. From where I come, read India, plants just grow…no care
or effort is really warranted; it’s just nature taking its natural course…much like our population.
Everywhere you look, you find the eternal green with the spot-more crowd.
But…I digress.
My tête-à-tête with flora has come to being recently when much else done from my end had failed to
bring about any greenery in my humble balcony. Perennial flowers that grow with minimum upkeep in
other people’s care, expired before their time; small plants destined to outlive me changed the course of
their own fate, leaving me wondering whether I murdered them with my delusionary kind hands or did
they just commit suicide in spite of my attempts to pamper them all. The perplexity went beyond the
ordinary. And so a survey was in order.
My first insight into what could be going wrong came from my brother who proposed that the lyrics of the
song I used to sing to them may have something to do with it. Do you perhaps croon, “Diiiiieeee!!!” he
asked me. “No, I don’t!” I screamed back indignantly as I saw him grinning from ear to ear. It’s most
infuriating to watch my genetic counterpart waiting for his small victories around my zone and finding
sadistic delight in my failures. Except, that it’s not.
My father was kinder and suggested that we employ the services of a good gardener. After all, it’s just
about having some green in our home, he told me. To be honest, that’s really what it was in the
beginning. But the more I yellowed, browned and blackened my plants, the more vehemently I wanted to
be the one responsible for greening them too. Some marks for perseverance then.
“They all just die. It has something to do with the building we stay in. There are negative vibes,” a friend
of my mother's sighed sympathetically. Well good to know we humans are surviving those!

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