Vinit KS

Martin Luther King once said – Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”. Following this thought, I am here to take my first step in becoming a better speaker.

My name is Vinit Kumar Singh. I am working as Technical Project Manager in HCL Technologies since more than a year. I am managing a team of around 90+ Microsoft Developers; hence my role demands extensive public speaking in terms of speaking, coaching and motivating team members. But unfortunately I have always been just an ordinary speaker primarily due to lack of practice and my nervousness. So, I was really looking for diverse group of individuals could help me accomplish my goals  of getting away from my nerves and to convert the nervousness into positive energy and become an effective speaker. And then I heard about toastmaster in one of the HCL employee mailer which said to become a toastmaster member to increase confidence in public speaking. I attended two session at Jalvayu Vihar as a guest and that is it – I made up my mind to be a Toastmaster and took my first step to become an effective public speaker.

Speaking about my childhood, I come from a humble background born in a lower middle class family in a small town of Bihar named Samastipur. I studied there for couple of years and then owing to my daddy’s transferable job, my childhood was spent in many part of the country from Derabassi, Punjab, to Aurangabad, Maharashtra, Ankleshwar, Gujarat, to Muzaffarnagar, UP, to Amristsar, Punjab, finally to Punjab – Jalandhar – where I completed my BCA. As you can see I had fairly cosmopolitan background. I was above average both in studies and games. In studies, I used to get ranked in top 10 students and in sports I represented my school in many games like Cricket, Football, Badminton, Chess, Carromboard etc.  In a sense, I was aimless jack of all trade kind of guy.

I am an avid reader and have ready many Self Help books of Vivekananda, Napolean Hill, Dale Carnegie, Robin Sharma etc… I have a small collection of books from these great writers. Even though I was an exceptionally an ordinary and not that confident guy, reading Vivekananda’s and other notable people’s work transformed me into confident and focused individual. I came up with my life goal plans and started working on it. So, the first major lesson I learnt in life was to read good books and have we thought and written goals in life.

Talking about my career, there were three phases in my career. First phase was a bit confused and snail pace one. It started in Jalandhar, Punjab when I joined a startup company named Third Eye Software Ltd as Software Engineer. Programming standards were high there but team size was very small hence I did many things like freelancing and teaching along with it . In the second phase of my career, I was more focused and in a fast lane of growth. I switched to a mid-size company named Safaltek Software in Chandigarh. Joining Safaltek was turning point in my life. I got many challenging and rewarding opportunities there and I rose from Software Engineer to Project Manager there within a span of just 4 years with 6 continuous promotions. For project work, I travelled across world including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Salt Lake City then Hong Kong etc. I saw success after success there. The lesson I learnt here is that hard work is the key of success.

And then came my third phase of career. That was when my parents selected a beautiful girl for me named Sunanda. Would you believe I got married with Sunanda just by seeing her photograph? The level of job responsibility was so huge on my shoulder that we could not even go for honeymoon after marriage. Luckily, even than Sunanda supported me whole heartedly. And gradually she started helping me to make me realize that there are several other important things in life other than work. While working in Safaltek I was so engrossed in work that I never thought of anything else, I was getting too fat, hardly taking any leaves for meeting my parents and other family members, never explored other great things happening around world like Toastmasters and all.  So, finally I started to thinking of changing the Job to another company having better work life balance. So, I started giving interviews and got offers from many of the companies and I finally selected HCL Technologies in Noida again as a Technical Project Manager. So, in a way, this was only due to my wife that I switched to HCL and in HCL I heard about toastmaster – so I am here only due to her. And the lesson I learnt here is the smart work and not only hard work is the key of success.

Coming to my aspirations in life I am ordinary guy with extraordinary dreams. My life time goal is to become a Philanthropist so that I can make this planet a better place. To achieve that I aspire first to become CEO/CTO of a large organization and make some world class software products that should make positive difference to the life of people. And then by 2020 – I aspire to become an entrepreneur myself heading a large Software organization.  And by 2030, I would like to start my philanthropy work. I am sure being a part of ToastMaster is going to help me succeed in my aspirations.

This is all about my life and me. 

Thank you so much.

P.S. – Delivered this speech as my P1 (CC1) project at Toastmasters.