Blog Challenge: Tell us a story

Next in the line of my blog challenge entries is Tell us a story. The goal in this challenge:

The challenge is not to write about your day-to-day life, or even your opinion of your day-to-day life. It is to write about a memory, a moment in your past, an adventure, a first, or even a non-event experience like a fun walk in the rain, making a snow fort, surfing, or about an important person in your childhood like a parent, relative, or best friend.

I'm not even sure why I remember this particular incident I'm going to talk about. When you're kids, its hard to understand what gets stuck in your head as memories. So this is around the time when I was in 4th or 5th grade maybe. Hindustan Times came up with this contest where you had to write about your role model and why is he/she your role model. There were some prizes as incentives, but best of all, HT said they would publish some selected entries in the newspaper. So me and my sister got all excited and decided to take part.

Now I admire my dad a lot – I look up to him all the time and he has taught me a great many lessons in life. So I was absolutely clear as to who I was going to write about. The only problem was that my vocabulary wasn't very good (and that doesn't seem to have changed over the years :( ). Anyways, so I sat down for days with a dictionary and a thesaurus, finding my way through the jungle of words, picking out the words that most concisely described what I wanted to say. And I dare say that I wrote an entry that even I was proud of.

My sister on the other hand went the more cliched route (actually thats not entirely true. She may have been actually inspired by her role model… I'll check up with her). She wrote about Mother Theresa but I was a little un-impressed by her choice of role model because mine was more personal

Anyways, so we mailed out our entries (yes, no Internet at that time in India, just good old postal mail). The big day finally came around and everybody crowded around the newspaper to see if we made it. And there it was – my sister's entry, and mine was no where to be found. It was not a big deal of course, but it did leave me wondering. Was it because my sister had written about famous person, that probably many others had also written about, that led the selection of her entry? I was a little pissed off as well, because as a child that made me feel as if my role model was being compare with others' role models and that made me angry. I always wonder, if I had written about Gandhi or Nehru instead, would I have made it in… But, no regrets, my decision still stands firm and if only I could find that piece from years back, I'd copy it here.