My tryst with Pongal festival

There are lot of festivals in our country like India.But one festival that goes with the country's back bone,that is agriculture is Pongal festival.In school days,we  enjoy Pongal for one reason,3 day holiday for schools.So on the pongal day,we celebrate with pongal foods,sungarcane and sweets.The most favourite food for me on Pongal day is the Sweet pongal(or sakkarai pongal-a pongal mixed with jaggery).Compared to diwali,pongal is better for one reason,there is less no of sweets as the heaviness due to food is more in diwali.

Second day is mattu pongal,we tease guys saying that this pongal is dedicated to you as this pongal is for cows.The most famous thing in the villages is the sport called as jallikattu or cow taming sport where a cow is forced to run and youngster try to tame it.It is a blood sport but its a traditional sport and shows the courage participants.there is a call to ban the sports,if this is to be banned ,then wrestling,boxing and mexican bull fight should also be banned,

Third day in chennai,people throng to the marina beach,if you see marina beach on this day,it would be black because of so many people and you cannot see a single bit of sand.But kanum pongal is known for meeting elders.

Then the thought of going to our village for a pongal festival.that time ,all my relatives were talking about burbet kolambu.In the thottam or garden a camp fire is made in which a clay pot is kept and rice is made and after in another clay pot they were making burbet kolamba. I was excited again and again as people were talking about burbet  kolambu.We sat to eat in the mud floor with banana leaves.The rice was sticken together and it was like eating big big balls.Most sorry thing is that I am unable eat a bit of burbet kolambu as it was nothing but hot water filling with chilli ,garlic and puli and It was so bitter and spicy water is coming from my eyes and  hot air is coming from my ears.After  that whenever I am pissed off with somebody I nickname and call them as Burbet Thalaya.

CC3 Speech: Get To the point

Topic: Benefits of Blogging

In the year 2004, an IIT engineer working in USA become restless with his job & routine life .He came back to India and started a blog in which he wrote articles about tech gadgets, computer software , tips & tutorials. Now his blog is getting around 45 lakh visitors per month and unofficially he is making a profit of 10 lakh per month from his blog. His name is Anil Agarwal and his blog is www.labnol.org

Good morning fellow toastmasters today my speech is to inform you on the benefits of blogging.

First of all let us understand about blogging. A blog is a short form for web log. Usually we have a personal diary or a journal in which we write casually about our life events, interests & hobbies. Similarly a blog is a website in which we log our interests in the form of articles. The advantage of blog is we write and it gets instantly published. There is no need of learning html codes which is involved in creating a website. Anyone having an idea to use emails can easily create a blog using blogging websites like blogger, word press, and live journal.

A blog is usually on written on niche or specific topics of interest like tech gadgets, cooking, travel, politics, fashion, movies.

Blogging can be considered to be a great place to show off our skill and also an outlet to pour out our inner stuff. We are good in some sort of skill that can be written as articles in our blog which inturn helps the readers. For example a fashion designer can post tips on latest fashion trends & dressing tips. That information would be very informative and useful to readers.

A Blog creates community, Readers actively provide feedback to the posted articles and the conversation among the community created by your blog builds on its own. For example a southindian food blog is created by a 45 year old lady kamala called as www.kamalascorner.com. In her blog www.kamalascorner.com,she has shared many of her known Southindian food recipes with photographs. Her recipes are very useful to the community. Readers try at their home and give feedback and the community thus thrives like our toastmaster community.

Blog is casual, democratic and independent. To get our writing published in any print media like newspapers and magazines, it is very difficult. But a blog is easy to create and we have the freedom to write in a way as we wish in our own verbatim and language. The writing from us is easily published for the world to see and not like the usual print media where there is a editor to scrutinize, accept or reject, edit or restrict our article details.

Blogs can be monetised and make us money. If the blog gets good following and readership, ads are placed near your articles and as many people see the ads, more money is paid to the blogger. Google adsense, Chithika are the few ad programs which helps bloggers in making money. But it takes a year at least for a blogger to see a good amount of money through their blogs.

 Blogs is flexible and it’s not monotonous. Some people are good in words and in writing articles so they can use blogger & word press services. But many other people are good with their creative side of expressing themselves like photographs, graphic design and videos. So Photo blogs like tumblr can be used to blog photos. Youtube, vimeo are some websites to blog through videos.

Blog need not be from a single author and they can have multiple authors and thus enhancing a team spirit. They are called collaborative blogs. Political blog Huffington post is a multiple author blog and it is now ranked best among the blogs and has highest traffic of readers. Engadget,Gizmodo,techcrunch are some gadget related blogs with multiple authors.

I would like to conclude by saying that we can enjoy the benefits of blogging only by blogging. We all can blog as most of us spend our time in social networks with comments about our interests like I comment about movies .Likewise ,taking our comments as an idea & if we can spend some more time in expanding those comments into 300-400 word articles, we can easily blog and enjoy its benefits.