Be A winner

Crowns and Roses
~Yuri~
BE A WINNER


There are no short cuts in life. For everything that you win, there is the sacrifice and pain that you have to go through. If you think Sushmita Sen or Aishwarya just got up one morning and decided to win the Miss India pageants, you couldn’t be more wrong. Well of course this is how it actually happened. Except that most people do not know what went on between that morning and the wonderful evening when they wore those crowns. The preparatory year or more that they went through to be able to realize their dream. And believe me, it didn’t just start and finish on the ramp. The ramp was just an essential part they trained themselves for. They toiled for months to groom themselves in various fields and eventually emerge winners. They learnt to speak well, increased their awareness of the world, improved their diction, modulation, mannerism. And all this with a clear goal that they both believed in. Ash was the favorite to win, ask anyone, and Sush had all the reason to believe that she could not win.

Here’s an interesting story that goes with that magical evening when Sush and Ash changed the way the country looks at beauty pageants.

Aishwarya was so amazingly good looking that most of the prospective contestants, when they heard she was competing, withdrew their names that year. It is believed that Sushmita was also one of them. But her mother, Shubra Sen, coaxed her into entering the contest. Sush comes from a fine Air Force family, went to school at the Golden Jubilee Air Force School in Delhi, and both her parents are polished and well spoken. Even then, she went through a lot of coaching in proper diction and speaking.

From being in two minds about entering the contest, she arrived at the pageant brimming with confidence, but yet the dark horse. The preliminaries happened and Ash was leading all the way. In fact, Aishwarya won all the major sub contests including the swimsuit round in which Sush was not even in the first 10.

To cut a long story short, Sushmita did not lose heart, she continued to perform as if her life depended on it. Eventually, the final 9 contestants were short listed. Of course, Sushmita was one of them. The final 5 was announced after a question answer round. Sushmita would not give up. No one knew it then but Ash was leading at that stage and Sush had caught up to a close second place. Ash was in any case the favorite to win. And then the final question was answered by the chosen 5. Here are the results. Jasmeet Kaur who is now a famous model known as Jaessae Randhawa and Shweta Menon, who you have probably seen in many Bollywood films, made the 5th and 4th position. Francesca Hart who represented India in the Miss International later that year, made the second runner up. That only left Ash and Sush…… and hear this, their scores were exactly equal…… it was a tie. For the first time in the Miss India pageant, they used a tie breaker to resolve the issue. At the end of it, Sushmita Sen scored 9.40 while Aishwarya Rai got 9.39. The difference was just 0.01, but Sush had done it ! Namrata Shirodkar put the crown on her head.

Do you see where hard work and self belief can lead you ! I told you this story just so that you stay motivated. Along with that, please realize that becoming a Miss India is not just all glamour, fame and parties. That too, but a little later. You have to groom yourself for months before the pageant so that your performance is flawless. It gets boring sometimes and at that time you have to motivate yourself by imagining all the good things that come with winning.

In the last 6 issues of Models n Trends you’ve been reading about the preparation prior to a pageant. We have recently been talking about speaking skills. In the next issue, we will continue with that and later go on to other skills. But once in a while, I’ll keep telling you about the greats in the business, because unless you are single minded and focused, I’ll have a tough job keeping you on track. Keep that effort going, winning the crown is not as difficult as you think !

If you want to ask me anything else about the subject, contact me on yuriyuriyuri@gmail.com