A gift 7 years in the making

What would you say if I told you that a gift takes 7 years to finally reach the intended recipient? So here is a short true story of how that gift finally reached but with the inclusion of a very unlikely person.

7 years back I had written a blog post about the various people I had met through blogging personally or had developed a very good understanding with them. It was a two part post, each of them almost a year apart. In the 1st part, Devashree Birari had taken the top spot and although we have never met in person (she’s in Nasik, whereas I can be found either in Delhi or Lucknow). She had become so emotional after reading those lines and told me that she would frame those lines someday and it has been "n" number of times that she has read, re-read those lines over all these years apart from making every member of her family read it over and over.

So this time just out of the blue I thought of fulfilling her that wish true. It was not as easy as it sounded. It took me a lot of time to understand that how should I fulfil that with the mediums available? Finally I figured out a website which was providing customisable "quotes on metal" printing (wont name them due to reasons you’ll read later). I designed the whole layout and all but the problem started when it was time to “add to cart”. Don`t know what kind of a system error was there but it was not allowing me to complete the order and the logo on the website was processing which seemed to never end. I used to stay on the computer screen for half an hour and even beyond but to no avail. When I contacted customer support over chat, they were clueless. Finally I had to write in a lengthy email describing all that was happening along with various screenshots and then a particular executive had some idea of what was happening. Despite the fact that he was in touch with the backend IT team but my issue never resolved as from his end it was all okay but as a customer, for me, the problem remained. I wrote them another email describing my whole order and what I want along with the full colour scheme, font, size, everything needed so that they can create the same order from their end and add into my cart so that I can go through.

It seemed that God was not willing to have this gift prepared just like that, so the mistake that the site did was in spite of the providing me exact colour codes of the text, somebody botched up and messed up the colour in the preview. All this had already wasted around 3 weeks of my time and I was surely not in the mood to go through the whole process again. Was wondering what to do next one evening, my eyes wandered to a calligraphy someone had made for me back in what would be the last event for a lot of us. Enter Tara Nair from Pune, Indiblogger calligraphy artist I had met back in 2017 in Dehradun which was the last event for a lot of bloggers. The hunt to search her began. I am active on Twitter, she’s almost extinct like the dinosaurs…. She is active on insta, I have no clue how to operate that. Somehow at some random posts I messaged her that I needed help and hoped that she might remember me. My good luck she did. When I told her the whole story and how this game is seven years in the making, I don’t think I’ve seen somebody so much excited to do that because if you see, places like Dehradun, Nasik, Pune, Lucknow all coming together out of the blue one fine day… that is unbelievable. She still says that God wanted this in to be completed by her and she considers herself lucky that she was chosen medium for that.

I sent her the exact blog text, along with the original grammatical mistakes included as we were recreating the original. Along with that in a secondary writeup which conveyed need and emotions of fulfilling this gift. It took another 3 weeks to complete and dispatch it with the whole process taking us a full month from the time of contacting her. She was nervous as hell to know my response and I could not respond in time due to being busy, or at times when she wanted a response I could only say “hmmm or “ its ok” . At all such times she had mini heart attacks thinking that what wrong had she done? Her sibling had to calm her down.. Well that was epic I must say.

As I write this post today, the gift has been received and Devashree Ji loved it…thats the main and important part for us. If you want to give a gift, you need a time, effort, creativity to pull it off. It was great that tara could understand my vision of how I wanted it to be, I had a fairly clear idea of how I wanted the final result to look like and she had the medium to do that. 3 indibloggers coming together to fulfill a promise after so many years.

You can get in touch with tara @taranairstudio (Instagram)

Tara in 2017