25
'Here’s the plan,’ she said. She slid an A4 sheet towards me.
We were in Takshila Restaurant at the Chanakya Hotel for dinner.
We were meeting a week later, after I had spent Monday to Friday in
Dumraon.The waiter arrived to take our order. She ordered plain
yellow daal and phulkas.
‘I miss home food,’ she said.
I missed you, I wanted to say but didn’t. The five days in Dumraon
had felt like five life sentences.
‘Sure, I like yellow daal,’ I said.
I picked up the A4 sheet. It read:
Action Plan: Operation Gates
Objective: Ten-minute speech in fluent English to a live American
audience.
10 minutes = approximately 600 words.
Focus Areas:
- Delivery: confidence, style, accent, flow, pauses, eye contact.
- Content: rational points, emotional moments, call for aid.
I looked up at Riya. ‘You typed all this?’
‘No, little elves did at midnight,’ she said. ‘Go on, read the whole
sheet.’
I turned to the sheet again.
Top Ten Tools: - YouTube videos of famous speeches.
- Watching English movies with subtitles.
- English-only days—no Hindi conversation allowed.
- Working on speech content in Hindi first.
- Recording an English voice diary on the phone through the day.
- Thinking in English.
- Watching television news debates in English.