Victory Speech

In my last post I detailed some of the events that were happening around the time I was doing my internship at the President’s Office, namely, the local council elections.

This was the first time ever that such councils were elected in the Maldives. The number of seats won by two main political parties, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), and Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP) were somewhat evenly matched. MDP won the majority seats in almost all of the heavily populated constituencies while DRP had a bigger margin of victory on total seats won. This lead to both sides claiming victory, and there was no clear conclusion to be reached.

But claiming victory means that a victory speech has to follow and that was the next task on hand. The speech was to be given by President Mohammed Nasheed. This was quite a high level affair, and I was fortunate to have been allowed to sit in during the meeting. I got a first hand experience of how official speeches are prepared. The team involved in this task comprised of junior executive and technical staff, as well as senior officials from policy and media sections. It was a very cooperative and collaborative effort, and I was made comfortable with pitching in to the discussion if I had something to add.

There was a lot of bouncing around of ideas, rephrasing and reworking parts from earlier speeches given by the President to make it more relevant to the occasion, and keeping it current. The pacing, flow and even individual words were analyzed in detail. I was allowed to leave early from the meeting, as there was further work to be done that night that I might be called for, so I left before the meeting concluded.

Later that night I caught part of the speech when it was broadcast live on the state television channel, and I found myself listening in to hear how much of the speech I recognized from the meeting (President Nasheed is an eloquent orator, and its frequently the case where he would veer off from the prepared speech and just ad-lib).

I think most of the speech that we worked made it intact in to the final delivery, which felt good, cause how ever small the part I played, I knew it was part of something major.