Centennial RYLA Report Part 2
Contributed By Rtr Harnniann
RYLA Starts
After the unnecessarily lengthy, boring, and no fun at all opening ceremony (which I do not want to waste much time elaborating), the RYLA 2005 started at last. We had ice breaking games, which again was extremely childish and uncreative. We were asked to get to know 5 persons in 30 seconds then later we have to find out 3 things he likes and 3 things he dislikes. Uurghh!
After the ice breaking (I hoped it did crack the ice berg), we were divided into 4 groups: the red, the green, the orange and the yellow. I was the yellow. Each group will come up with the group name, group cheers and group leader.
It is worthwhile to state here that the only two youth exchange students, a Canadian and a Brazilian were both in my group. As everyone was very shy and unimaginative, it took a long time for us to start talking. But one medical student broke the silence and suggested we called ourselves “yellow, yellow dirty fellow”. How lame is that?! So, I said what about “Bananas”? To my surprise, the Brazilian boy said that was a good name and everyone just concurred. So that’s our name, “The Bananas”.
Since the Brazilian boy is the tallest among us so we picked him as our leader (another sign of being uncreative and unimaginative).
The Talks
After lunch, we had our first talk. Before I go into the talks, I wish to say that from here onwards, everyone pays punctuality only lip service. Time is no longer of the essence. There was no usher, no enforcer to tell us it’s time to drop our fork and spoon and rush to the auditorium. So as you can imagine, everyone took their own sweet time to have lunch, dessert, fruits or even enjoying a small chat with new friends while our speakers were patiently waiting for us in the auditorium.
The talks started 15 minutes late and from there onwards none of the talks for the next 3 days were punctual.
As you probably can tell from the schedule, RYLA offered us a great deal of talks with a variety of topic ranging from as trivial as knowing ourselves to issues as big as racial harmony. However, there are only a few talks worth highlighting here.
Our very first speaker was Mr. Paul Jambunathan a.k.a Fishy Jambu. He is a psychologist by profession. His topic was “who am I?”. He talks about knowing ourselves, our emotions and our feelings. One thing I like about his talk was that he wanted us to be different. Not to follow blindly. He gave an example of himself. Had he followed his father’s advice he would end up being a doctor. Not to say that being doctor is not good, but more importantly, being a doctor is not something Jambu wants or enjoys. He wants to be a psychologist. He listened to his inner self, defied all the advice of the elders and dared to be different. So, I learned to be different.
Dolly Kee is a woman you seldom if not never see walking on the street. The way she wears, conducts herself and speaks is impeccable. She is so unreal. She speaks on “Image Power”. This was what she said, “image is not a way to fool others, but rather a communication tool to express our strengths, attributes and attitudes. It is therefore vital that we take charge of all these “image tangibles” and make them work for us instead of against us”. She did some demonstrations to show us how important image is in our society. Unfortunately, I feel that she had spent too much time focusing on the wrong issues. We all know that image is important so by looking professional it would help us in giving other’s a good impression of ourselves. But she missed the bigger and more important picture. She didn’t touch on “how” to wear professionally. Her main focus was on “why” to wear professionally. What a waste. She was an interesting speaker who caught her audience’s attention. She started her talk by asking. “do you trust me?” It was a very bold question. Nevertheless, lucky for her, some of the audience actually said yes.
I was given the task of introducing the only speaker in uniform—the ex-OCPD of Klang. I am quite sure some of you may have heard of him already. He is now the head of the Prosecution and Investigation Studies, Royal Police College, Cheras. His topic was “youth and crime”. The highlight of his talk was when he showed us picture of a human body badly slashed, chopped, sliced, cut, severed whatever words you want to call it in a gang clash using power point. Then he asked us whether we are ready for lunch. Come one man! There went my appetite. The pictures he showed were really ghastly and I bet you could not find them in any newspaper. But I guess the picture served its educational purposes. Now, everyone would think twice before engaging a fight blindly. Oh, one more thing before I leave our ex-OCPD alone, during Q & A sessions, someone asked him how many people he had killed. He asked us to guess. So we shouted numbers like 2, 10, 25 and 28. I was stunned in disbelief when he told us the actual number. During his career as a policeman, he had shot dead 169 people (here’s the catch: he didn’t say criminals or bad guys). From the manner he told us, I guess he feels proud about it.
Apart from the above talks which I specifically highlighted, we had speakers who talked on racial harmony and Rakan Muda (both were disasters from the start and I failed to see the relevancy); who talked on chairing a successful meeting, managing personal and club’s funds, organizing successful club projects etc. Ok, speaking of successful club projects, do you all know what are the criteria of a successful project? The key word is “originality”. Why? Come on now, folks. That’s food for thought.
I have some comment about the talks. I also voiced this out during forum time at the end of RYLA. If you look at the schedule, it was really tight. And worse still, we were all confined in the four walls of the auditorium and had to be seated like schoolboys. Further, there are some sessions which had 3 to 5 talks in a row with short coffee breaks in between. Please bear in mind that the majority of the participants were people like me who had left school for a number of years. And to ask us to sit down for a few hours listening to speakers after speakers without any form of physical activities is unwise. Another word to describe this scenario is “torturing”.
I expected more outdoor activities like rock climbing, canoeing, tug of war, sports etc but what I got was classrooms, meeting rooms, conference rooms and auditorium. At first when I looked at the program called “Rakan Muda”, I thought we were going to have fun doing some kick a** activities. Instead, we have some Timbalan Pengarah schooled us on the background of Rakan Muda. Sheer disappointment.
(To be continued)
RYLA Starts
After the unnecessarily lengthy, boring, and no fun at all opening ceremony (which I do not want to waste much time elaborating), the RYLA 2005 started at last. We had ice breaking games, which again was extremely childish and uncreative. We were asked to get to know 5 persons in 30 seconds then later we have to find out 3 things he likes and 3 things he dislikes. Uurghh!
After the ice breaking (I hoped it did crack the ice berg), we were divided into 4 groups: the red, the green, the orange and the yellow. I was the yellow. Each group will come up with the group name, group cheers and group leader.
It is worthwhile to state here that the only two youth exchange students, a Canadian and a Brazilian were both in my group. As everyone was very shy and unimaginative, it took a long time for us to start talking. But one medical student broke the silence and suggested we called ourselves “yellow, yellow dirty fellow”. How lame is that?! So, I said what about “Bananas”? To my surprise, the Brazilian boy said that was a good name and everyone just concurred. So that’s our name, “The Bananas”.
Since the Brazilian boy is the tallest among us so we picked him as our leader (another sign of being uncreative and unimaginative).
The Talks
After lunch, we had our first talk. Before I go into the talks, I wish to say that from here onwards, everyone pays punctuality only lip service. Time is no longer of the essence. There was no usher, no enforcer to tell us it’s time to drop our fork and spoon and rush to the auditorium. So as you can imagine, everyone took their own sweet time to have lunch, dessert, fruits or even enjoying a small chat with new friends while our speakers were patiently waiting for us in the auditorium.
The talks started 15 minutes late and from there onwards none of the talks for the next 3 days were punctual.
As you probably can tell from the schedule, RYLA offered us a great deal of talks with a variety of topic ranging from as trivial as knowing ourselves to issues as big as racial harmony. However, there are only a few talks worth highlighting here.
Our very first speaker was Mr. Paul Jambunathan a.k.a Fishy Jambu. He is a psychologist by profession. His topic was “who am I?”. He talks about knowing ourselves, our emotions and our feelings. One thing I like about his talk was that he wanted us to be different. Not to follow blindly. He gave an example of himself. Had he followed his father’s advice he would end up being a doctor. Not to say that being doctor is not good, but more importantly, being a doctor is not something Jambu wants or enjoys. He wants to be a psychologist. He listened to his inner self, defied all the advice of the elders and dared to be different. So, I learned to be different.
Dolly Kee is a woman you seldom if not never see walking on the street. The way she wears, conducts herself and speaks is impeccable. She is so unreal. She speaks on “Image Power”. This was what she said, “image is not a way to fool others, but rather a communication tool to express our strengths, attributes and attitudes. It is therefore vital that we take charge of all these “image tangibles” and make them work for us instead of against us”. She did some demonstrations to show us how important image is in our society. Unfortunately, I feel that she had spent too much time focusing on the wrong issues. We all know that image is important so by looking professional it would help us in giving other’s a good impression of ourselves. But she missed the bigger and more important picture. She didn’t touch on “how” to wear professionally. Her main focus was on “why” to wear professionally. What a waste. She was an interesting speaker who caught her audience’s attention. She started her talk by asking. “do you trust me?” It was a very bold question. Nevertheless, lucky for her, some of the audience actually said yes.
I was given the task of introducing the only speaker in uniform—the ex-OCPD of Klang. I am quite sure some of you may have heard of him already. He is now the head of the Prosecution and Investigation Studies, Royal Police College, Cheras. His topic was “youth and crime”. The highlight of his talk was when he showed us picture of a human body badly slashed, chopped, sliced, cut, severed whatever words you want to call it in a gang clash using power point. Then he asked us whether we are ready for lunch. Come one man! There went my appetite. The pictures he showed were really ghastly and I bet you could not find them in any newspaper. But I guess the picture served its educational purposes. Now, everyone would think twice before engaging a fight blindly. Oh, one more thing before I leave our ex-OCPD alone, during Q & A sessions, someone asked him how many people he had killed. He asked us to guess. So we shouted numbers like 2, 10, 25 and 28. I was stunned in disbelief when he told us the actual number. During his career as a policeman, he had shot dead 169 people (here’s the catch: he didn’t say criminals or bad guys). From the manner he told us, I guess he feels proud about it.
Apart from the above talks which I specifically highlighted, we had speakers who talked on racial harmony and Rakan Muda (both were disasters from the start and I failed to see the relevancy); who talked on chairing a successful meeting, managing personal and club’s funds, organizing successful club projects etc. Ok, speaking of successful club projects, do you all know what are the criteria of a successful project? The key word is “originality”. Why? Come on now, folks. That’s food for thought.
I have some comment about the talks. I also voiced this out during forum time at the end of RYLA. If you look at the schedule, it was really tight. And worse still, we were all confined in the four walls of the auditorium and had to be seated like schoolboys. Further, there are some sessions which had 3 to 5 talks in a row with short coffee breaks in between. Please bear in mind that the majority of the participants were people like me who had left school for a number of years. And to ask us to sit down for a few hours listening to speakers after speakers without any form of physical activities is unwise. Another word to describe this scenario is “torturing”.
I expected more outdoor activities like rock climbing, canoeing, tug of war, sports etc but what I got was classrooms, meeting rooms, conference rooms and auditorium. At first when I looked at the program called “Rakan Muda”, I thought we were going to have fun doing some kick a** activities. Instead, we have some Timbalan Pengarah schooled us on the background of Rakan Muda. Sheer disappointment.
(To be continued)
Labels: Report
posted by harnniann at 2:40 pm
5 Comments:
Bro, did you realize Paul Jambunathan is Rev Jambunathan's son? I bet you know....
Yeah Prez,
I found out later when talking to PP Mike... he is a great speaker, just like his father
Great line of speakers RYLA has.
Surprisingly there are no outdoor activities.
It should be part of leadership training.
It is good write up about what a participant should expect from attending RYLA.
Hui Hui,
I think the outdoor part not yet arrive. I can feel it coming!! He has more to come...
Feld
It's nice to know a Dist 3300 Rotaract club blog that is constantly updated. Kudos to RAC Port Klang Centennial! Especially to Harnniann for keeping it alive and kicking. Guess it's about time I leave a comment or two to give it more kick (not that racpklg.blogspot needs it).
I read with much amusement - this write-up on the Centennial RYLA. I'm getting the message that I'm not gonna feel proud telling people I'm a RYLArian anymore (not that I've been telling all this while).
Sad to say and to note here, for 100 years now Rotary (was, is and) will still be the same 100 years to come.
Leadership has always been (in Rotary terms) someone who posesses the ability to follow the (wise) words of the elders, and the rules of the day. That's why in RYLA, it's talk, talk, talk and more talk until you listen (not that we don't).
Rotarians of Dist 3300 (I mean by a majority) need to realise and accept that leaders of today are individuals encouraged to challenge the norms, be different from what they can be, be heard when they speak of unfamilar and uncommon words, and lastly to have the confidence to do what is desired and right.
That's why I was a Rotaractor, and forever will be, in my heart. May Rotaract be your training ground in real leadership skills development.
Keep up the spirit of Fellowship Through Service my dear friends in RAC Port Klang Centennial.
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