Sanga the skilled orator!

Today morning I woke up, switched on the computer and searched for sanga's speech. While the download was happening I logged into facebook and one of my friends had posted the guardian's report on it. Reading the review I got a negative feeling of the speech, first few lines implied that he has done a speech instead of a lecture and I got the impression as if the author felt that he has picked the wrong occasion to raise the issue about the board. This made me even more curious.

It was Sanga - the orator at his best! He waxed eloquence in style. His mastery of the language, his skilled punches sugar quoted with some excellent sense of humor made it a very colourful exhibition of oratory! Any cricket lover would have loved to listen to his lecture and if you are a Sri Lankan cricket fan you can replace  your daily morning prayer tape with this! He managed to draw a vivid picture of the Sri Lankan Cricket and its history in the listeners minds. It was a very innocent, independent and impartial account of how he saw Sri Lankan cricket.

Incidentally by listening to this I ended up late to office and I was supposed to conduct a training session on presentation skills. Since I listened to the whole thing, including the post match discussion,  I lost more than one and a half hours of my preparation time for the training. And I was in a bit of fix thinking about what I should speak about, all of a sudden a bright idea dawned on me, why shouldn't I play this at the training session? So I picked the training area to be voice modulation and I played his speech from the 31st minute to the 41st minute. This was a piece studded with voice modulations any spoken English teacher will be proud to claim that as of her own student's. The joy and energy he exhibits to explain the build up to the world cup , winning it and then the switch in tone when he moves into the tsunami experience, where he manages to move the soul of the listener with his tone variation, voice modulation and perfectly timed pauses. Was an act of class which any performer would have loved to equal. Sanga made my day!

PS: I hope and pray that he and his family stays safe. Plus I hope that I wouldn't hear about a premature retirement from the game of cricket any time soon.

Listen to the full speech here.