This was the first SHG meeting for the Hyderabad chapter. 5 of us have attended the session - which included Neeraj, Rajashekhar, Chandra, Dharam & myself (Raja). All of us were very excited to be a part of this SHG meeting. We met at KBR park at 4:00 pm despite the scorching Hyderabad heat. It didn't take us much time to find each other & we made the Gate keeper throw open the national park to us - essentially we were the first entrants. Neeraj comes from BPO background, Chandra & Raja work for IT MNCs, Dharam works for a Telecom major & Rajashekar finished his Masters.

We started off by introducing each of ourselves primarily and our relationship (for lack of a better word) with stammering in our lives. We then ventured into our experiences with Speech Therapists - which ranged from useless to informative to promising. I have then introduced TISA to the group and the nature of its activities. We than discussed on the role of SHGs and how their role is to provide awareness, enhance knowledge, develop a community of PWS, introduce techniques, practice techniques, share feedback, complement (and not compete) with any other mechanisms that we may believe in to conquer stammering. We then discussed briefly about Acceptance and read a couple of case studies/stories of recovering PWS. They were quite inspiring.

With the theory by & large done, I introduced the stammering techniques at a high level (Bouncing & Prolongation) and then more specifically got into the Bouncing technique. We also discussed about Prolongation and thought it better for Dharam (he had attended a short course at Partha Bagchi’s stammering cure center) to get into the details of it in a later session. All of us attempted to give a brief introduction of self using bouncing technique. With some feedback, we then went on to talk about one light current topic each ranging from Sania’s marriage to Tharoor’s lady love adopting bouncing technique. The cake however belonged to Rajashekar for his narration of intense love story involving himself. I wouldn’t get into details but that revealed (in a positive way) a lot about himself to the crowd J.

It was getting dark at about 7:00 pm & we had to quit. Given it was first session, there was a good bit of introduction involved which I believe should be cut to minimum in subsequent sessions. We struggled to adopt bouncing effectively & uniformly as it was too quick to absorb for most folks, so we decided to chose another session exclusively focused on the technique. The best part of the meeting though was the camaraderie that we managed to build in the very first session. We gelled perfectly despite being a mixed crowd of bachelors & fathers. All of us were quite keen to continue these meetings. We tentatively decided to meet either the next Saturday or week after at preferably an alternative location.

(Ed: TISA family congratulates Hyderabad chapter and wishes them a happy journey of Self-discovery.. Special thanks to Raja!)