Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Positive Impact

"Be Positive" ... my mother keeps repeating n number of times. She has passed, with distinction so many life-threatening hurdles since her childhood. I wonder , how she still manages to " Be Positive ". Aai ( my Mother ) always pushes me to go ... give my Best and achieve Excellence. My Aai has the most positive Impact on my life.

Flashback  .... January 26, being Monday-holiday was an extension of lazy-Sunday. As usual I picked up my favorite, 'Hindustan Times' from the stack of 10 newspapers that my father has subscribed for. Thanks to my father, We have this luxury of reading 10 newspapers  daily. We have donated both our TV-sets to an orphanage in VikramGarh so we have more than enough interest and  time for reading. After browsing through the headlines, I extracted HT-Café ( HT's supplement ). ‘Super60’, whopper response to the ‘INDIA COOL CONTEST’ printed next to HT-Café’s masthead caught my eyeballs.

But of course, I had emailed an article(  contest-entry ) describing the sixty things and personalities, which make India cool. Now over to HT-Café’s Super60 list from A to Z. I started comparing my selection list with the published icons…

‘Abhinav Bindra, A R Rahman, Aravind Adiga, APJ Abdul Kalam, Ayurveda, Azim Premji, Backwaters of Kerala…. The list went on. I was like… oh yes! It’s all mine. I scanned the center spread. The Red-stripe at the end declared ‘FIVE WINNING ENTRIES’. Five? How’s that? On 21st January, Hindustan Times had advertised the ‘Super60’ contest as ‘Two lucky winners will be treated to a chopper-ride around the city and have their articles featured in HT-Café'.

Guess what? My name was there on that Red-stripe at the 3rd position. Naturally I was excited to be the one among five winners but the chopper-ride was promised only for two lucky winners.

Imagine, winning the contest but not getting ‘the prize’. I mean HT won’t be giving the chopper-ride to the 3rd winner, when they had already declared it for two winners. The chopper-ride around the city costs Rs. 20,000/- per person. Even though I was feeling on ‘Cloud 9’ already, I couldn’t break the news to my friends. What could I have told them? “Look! I have won the contest but I won’t be getting the prize”. How hyper is that?

That's when , my Aai , came in picture. She kept on repeating, " You have won it , you will get the prize-ride ". I spent the whole day checking emails. Next day, I received the congratulatory call from Hindustan Times about the chopper-ride. On Saturday, Captain Mody warmly welcomed the winners at Juhu - Pavan-Hans aerodrome.

Captain Mody acquainted us with the route, we would fly and the swanky helicopter named ‘Raven’. Raven was so ritzy that all of us went photo-frenzy. We clicked close-ups, blow-ups, and group-photos with Raven as the poster-stud in the background.

Finally at 10.30 am, Raven, the black beauty took off to give us ( the five winners of Hindustan Times' - India's Super60 contest ) the ‘Out of blue’ experience. The ride was Fantastico to say the least.  



#TataZicaMarathon 

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.

5 comments:

Kala Ravi said...

Hey congrats! Lucky you! And Aai tujhe salaam :)

Kala Ravi said...

Hey congrats! Lucky you! And Aai tujhe salaam :)

roopali said...

Wow . Nice post . and Congrats.

SUJATA TAWDE said...

Thanks Kala. Absolutely right , Our mothers are our Gods. Welcome to 'Spirit Of Mumbai'

SUJATA TAWDE said...

Thanks Rupali . Welcome to 'Spirit Of Mumbai'.