Sounds Intriguing? Read on 
It took two days for me to pronounce this word - Illustration; and that also when my cousin told me how to pronounce it. I was troubled thinking how can a word be pronounced which has 3 I’s as first three letter.
My elder sister had influenced me to study in Science stream instead of commerce after my 10th graduation. She asked me to give it a try and assured me that if I would not able to cop up with the English language, I can switch to Commerce. I felt the blow on the first day itself in mathematics text book with the above word, and there were other subjects also.
Textbooks for all the subjects were available in Hindi also, so I got in tune with studies in a year. Only text book which was not available in Hindi was of English and that also English as Higher language subject. I always passed this subject with grace marks in all the term exams. So what happened in Board exam? Miracle - The invigilator was sitting on my desk during 2 hours of exam but I sensed a tacit approval to cheat. So my classmate passed her supplement to me and I copied complete grammar section. I passed in English and scored decent marks in other subjects.
Do you believe in Miracle?
I didn’t speak much in English until I started preparing for my campus interview. I was going with my college friends and I saw a small board hanging on the balcony of fourth floor in an apartment. The board read - ‘TO LET’ (Only that much). I burst out laughing and told my friend to check the board. I told them that how stupid a person can be, who forgot to put ‘I’ and also, Is anyone going to run till forth floor to use public toilet especially in urgency!!
I need not write what followed after that. You can guess what happens in college when someone commit such a blooper. It happened when I was in first year. Few people still remember me because of this incident 
The journey with English seems to be life long. I keep on making mistake and I keep on learning. Few months back while in office, my colleague pinged me to inform me that, she has ordered Samosa for the team. After few minutes I pinged her back - “Hey when is Samosa wala coming, my mouth is littering” . She walked to my desk instead of replying my chat and told me it is supposed to be ‘watering’. I gave my team a reason to laugh while enjoying the delicious Samosas. But I am blessed with the caring colleagues who always appreciate me by saying - At least you keep trying. HO HO HO
In general, I face trouble in pronouncing the word starting with ‘S’ and followed by ‘I’. However hard I try, I always utter ‘Shinger’ instead of ‘Singer’
With time I made bit improvement which was noticed by my manager. So I was asked to impart a session on Effective E-mail communication to the team. I prepared hard for this presentation. And revised the content many times. The session happened a month ago and the best compliment I received was - Is it the same Vivek who joined this team two years back?
We should celebrate the small achievement. I celebrated that night
The next day, my manager asked me if I would be able to give the same session to other teams. (There are 4 different team in my project working on different business. We hardly interact with other teams) . I told him that it’s an opportunity for me.
I was bit nervous during my second presentation because the expectation was set to the audience that session will be worth their time. If 15 people are attending one hour session, it’s 15 billable hours which is being invested and that accounts for huge amount. I was indeed nervous during session. While hearing the session recording I realized that I had used ‘So’, ‘The thing is’, and ‘now’ in almost all the sentence I spoke. It was so embarrassing.
Third session : It turned out to be much better relative to previous two. I rectified the mistake I did earlier and added few extra points which I got as feedback from previous session. I received appreciation note from manager of that team and also from leaders of the complete project. I have heard the recordings several times till now.. all of one hour duration..
I partied hard that night. Dedicated to all who laughed at me, Dedicated to all who then corrected me, Dedicated to my colleague who sits beside me and bear all my bad usage of words and Dedicated to Toastmasters.
“Either I do things correctly or I learn”. This belief helps me keeping my ‘mistake’ dairy blank. And as there is nothing in my ‘mistake’ list, I always be confident for the new learnings.
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