Page 164 - Half Girlfriend

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'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:
1. Delivery: confidence, style, accent, flow, pauses, eye contact.

2. 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:
1. YouTube videos of famous speeches.

2. Watching English movies with subtitles.
3. English-only days—no Hindi conversation allowed.

4. Working on speech content in Hindi first.
5. Recording an English voice diary on the phone through the day.

6. Thinking in English.
7. Watching television news debates in English.