NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF PROF.WANGARI MAATHAI

UNIT 4 Lesson 1 Activity 1 Speech. 2nd Year

Imagine that you have won the National Green Corps (NCG) award for coordinating the activities of your school eco club. The award would be given
away by the Governor of the State in the presence of the Chief Minister and
certain other dignitaries. You are supposed to deliver a speech after receiving
the award. Draft the speech you would deliver.

Hon’ble Chief Minister , Governor other distinguished guests
and my dear friends,

Its really a great pleasure for me to receive this NCG Award for coordinating the
activities of our school eco-club. This award is a fillip to all members of the club.

My interest in environment is mainly from my father who is a teacher and social
activist. My school authorities nurtured it to turn my ideas and desire into creative action. So, I did not make the journey alone. My teachers, especially Sree Devi teacher , teacher in ch arge of eco-club, my eco-club mates and my friends – all were with me along the way. I feel proud to say that they are behind this award.

 People today are concerned about environment and are aware of consequences of environmental degradation. Hence, apart from organizing seminars, debates, lectures on environmental issues in school, we conducted field visits to polluted
and degraded sites and took up cleanliness drives. The initiatives taken by our
school eco-club in distributing seeds and saplings for compulsory kitchen garden
was immensely successful as the residents there are earning their living through
this. Installing Bio-gas plants, making herbal garden, starting a seed bank,
maintaining vermin-composing pits, constructing water-harvesting structure in
school- all these done well with the coordination and cooperation of our eco club
members proved to be the best ways of conserving environment and retaining
ecological balance. To be brief, we believed more in practising than preaching. I
feel, our eco-club activities are like an exploratory journey. I would like to say
what our teachers, friends and our club feel- it is a realization of a life dream!

This award is a symbol of our path towards success as we feel the joy of not only
doing something in school, but also knowing that we are doing something good for the environment and the world at the same time. The formation of eco-clubs inschools through which the students can take action to improve their immediate
environment and propagation of such eco- club activites will certainly do a
mammoth task for the sustainable development . Let us join our hands together to nurture the nature and to conserve it for our future and once again I want to say how grateful I am to receive this award.
Thank you.

STAMMER (satchidanandan)

The poet sees stammer not as a handicap, but an effective mode of communication. Stammer is actually a digestion time for the listener between the words of a speaker or it is the silence between a word and its meaning. Limp or lameness is the silence between word and deed. Here the reference is to the contemporary society where words and deeds are never in consonance. The poet also tries to wound our pious inaction on many burning social issues. We are reminded of an affluent society where words and deeds never contradicted and they lived in perfect harmony. We can only dream of such a society as our people fiddle when the Rome burns. It is often said that language is for communication. Human language is very complex because we can communicate very difficult and complicated ideas with the help of our language. Communication without language is also possible, which may have a fixed meaning and very limited scope for exchange of ideas.

Ambiguity is a very close friend of language. We can conveniently rename it as STAMMER. We stammer when we feel that the language we use is not sufficient to communicate our ideas OR the the language we use is not being properly understood. Therefore we can say that stammer is an attempt for meaningful communication or a megaphone diplomacy, which is an attribute, certainly laudable

Stammer actually opens up a different possibility for communication, which must be properly explored by linguists and poets. A poem can be given different interpretations by different readers and critics, which the poet might not have thought of. When a poet employs his bag of tricks to cherry pick an apt word or phrase for parturition, he stammers numerous times to God. It is actually the prayer of the poet to God to beget the best of his off springs. When we read the same poem we also stammer, trying to attribute different meanings to different words and phrases. Here both the poet and the readers are engaged in oblation. This kind of a brainstorming by the writer and the reader is absolutely necessary for the existence of any literary genre.

It goes without saying that the traits of creator will be reflected in his creation. It is almost an accepted fact that God might have stammered during the creation of man. This stammer is exactly reflected in man as well. (The concept of God itself is different strokes for different folks) Any how the stammer of God during the creation of man has given the language of man its ambiguity and variety. This unusual attribute of language is a boon to poets and literary figures. Their literary outputs are read and interpreted by attributing variety of meanings and connotations by readers and critics. Thus poetry is made bright eyed and bushy tailed, repeatedly asserting the fact that poetry is worth its weight in gold.

Stammer- A contemplation on the Absence of Creative Dialogues

The poem presents different perspectives on stammer . It presents stammer as a

struggle to translate our selves. It also justifies the presence of diversity in our life as

evident in the line "thats why all the words of man carry different meanings ".In that

sense the poem is about the different perceptions we have on life. Life is beautiful.

Even stammer is no handicap. It is a different mode of speech.

Though there is an effort to celebrate stammer as a different mode of speech in the

opening lines,slowly the poem becomes a slight to stammer ,especially in the lines

exploring the history of the word,as evident in "these questions make the linguists

stammer ". There begins a streak of concealed humour in the poem which is

sustained till the end .The references to 'the sacrifice we make to the God of meanings and 'a society with stammer as their mother tongue ' tell us about the the critical approach of the poet. Our response to the burning social issues are not good enough.

The poet then proceeds to remark that God stammered when He created man , that

man stammers and even the poets do. The difference is that we call it poetry when the

poets stammer ! . Even the poets fail in engaging in creative dialogues as and when

humanity is struggling to cope with the challenges like intolerance

,violence,terrorism , globalisation and commercialisation.The ironical shift in the

perspective on stammer is evident here.

Still the crisp ending with the words 'like poetry' brings back a tone of meditation,peace and hope. The poet seems to contemplate a hope that the times will

change and the conversation will be resumed.At the end of all the stammers, we

begin to wonder ,whether the poet has been translating himself or exploring the self

of others. As the poet himself has written once ,the poem conveys an apprehension

about the fate that awaits humanity.A contemplation that begins in stammer may

justly end in suffocation

MANUSCRIPT MAGAZINE RELEASING CEREMONY 2018-19 PLUS TWO HUMANITIES AND COMMERCE BATCH

Dear Students,

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