My Fundas of Life

We started late. I believe it was last Sunday when we had our profile up and going and were on the 19th page with no votes or testimonials. Now the most difficult part — getting votes. Deepa is known for her network - both in her professional circle and otherwise. So we immediately opened the various social networking sites where we are active and sent our link asking everyone to vote for us. I did the same with my friends.

After a day or two we made our way to the 11th page. But from here on we were short of votes vis-a-vis the toppers with 1000 plus votes. We started thinking, do we have not have sufficient friends? Although we have been blogging for long now, our friends’ comments used to come via phone since we are in touch with our friends quite regularly. Sometimes we had to tell them, “all the nice things that you’re telling us…why don’t you post these as comments in the blog?”

But getting votes for the Great Driving Challenge was a different experience. I must say all our friends who had come to know that we had applied for the challenge readily voted for us. I thank all for their votes!

Since we had our blogs we decided to post our profile hoping some blogger would notice, read about our passion for travelling and vote for us. I don’t know if it had happened because several friends of our friends have voted for us too.

However the worst part was reminding friends who were not voting. I couldn’t do that…neither would Deepa. But luckily they did vote for us ultimately. There were also friends with whom I had lost touch. The dilemma was how to ask them to vote for us when we had not spoken to them for so long. We didn’t. But somehow they came to know about our participation and a couple of beautiful testimonials came from them too.

But we wanted to qualify! We knew very well that we will not be able to reach the 1000-mark. Thankfully qualification was not solely based on votes. So both Deepa and I sat down to chalk out a strategy. We focused on what our strong points are. They are simple: WE TRAVEL, WE CLICK PHOTOGRAPHS AND WE WRITE ABOUT OUR EXPERIENCES! “Good enough,” we thought. So we tried to make our profile attractive, accurate and precise. We made changes in our profile from time to time — polishing and re-polishing!

We had two travel plans in mind: (1) Mumbai-Delhi-Mumbai and (2) Mumbai-Cochin-Mumbai. Although , the monsoons have arrived in the west and south at least, we decided on the second route owing to the fact that this route is a beautiful one, I’m told…plus the fact that we have a little experience driving in the monsoons to places in Himachal, ducking landslides and falling trees.

Friends from Cochin, Pune and Mumbai too confirmed that it was not a bad idea. Although it rains heavily, the highways are OK, they said. So our travel plan was finalised.

With voting coming to an end in a couple of hours, my concern is will the jury notice us on the 11th page. I hope so!! Anyways whatever the outcome, I’m satisfied…that’s what counts I suppose! WISH US LUCK!!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 12:28 am and is filed under My fundas of life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.