A contest, a royal invite, prizes and a few happy moments:)

 After a long time, I won a contest.  Remember, i had written about Madras day and the celebrations around it.  The madras day team had organized various interactive events to mark the celebrations of Madras day around the week.  Just curious to read the various anecdotes and experiences of Vintage Chennai aka Madras, I liked  "Madras day"  page on Facebook.

There was an announcement on the page about the contests from British Council India which were tempting but I was too late to   participate   since i missed their deadlines . I still had time to participate in their last contest and so signed in for "Name the iconic place of madras and write about it in 50 words".

I participated on all the 3 days and was declared the winner on their page for the above event. It was some thrill for me to see myname on their page. And the winners were invited as special invitees by the Prince of Arcot and The council at the Royal palace for an event "Madras memories"  organized by the British council on Aug 22

                                                         The invitation

                                            snap shot of the winners list on their site

The contest featured photos  of vintage chennai from "Vintagevignettes". (Since it is copyrighted I am not sharing)

But I will share with you my joy that i received by courier....

"A madras miscellany-  a decade of  people, places and potpourri" by S. Muthiah and a Sony 4GB memory stick.

For somebody who loves reading about history, people their experiences and anecdotes, this 1200 page  book is going to keep me occupied for the next few days with over a  thousand articles related to the city, its people and other miscellany  that appeared in The metroplus edition of national daily  "The Hindu." for a decade.

I have already completed 150 pages today and was surprised to read so many famous Indians had their base in this city like Lakshmi sehgal, Mrinalini Sarabhai and i am still discovering many beautiful things about this city.

But the highlight was when my children were overjoyed to see the prizes their mom had won and when my son remarked "Mom, i am sure you would have won the tab in the blog contest, had you participated". My daughter retorted" Oh, just wait, this is the beginning for mom".

Aah....people, if the display of my name and the prize was some thrill.....then these compliments from my children are my Booker, Oscar,Nobel, Grammy or whatever.......:) It was a visual delight to see the gleam in their eyes and I had to record both the joy and visual delight in words.