The deceiving clouds

Remember that song in Lagaan - Ghanana ghanana, where the entire village starts to sway and dance with glee as they notice dark, rain clouds at a distance? And remember what happens at the end of the song? - the clouds just deceive.

As Ludwig so rightly mentioned here, when it rains it does pour. But there are also times when clouds just deceive. This year just when we decided not to run after corporates for sponsorships we were inundated with calls from them offering to sponsor the event. There were moments when we were so overwhelmed that we had to tell ourselves that this indeed was happening . We even talked about putting a stop to accepting sponsorship requests.

But not all calls were converted. One fine morning we received a mail from someone from a multi-national bank with just one line: "We want to sponsor the event. Please call." We judiciously followed up; called the person, set up a meeting and went to talk to him as well. It fizzled out only because we couldn't offer them what they wanted. This was much after we had already landed our diamond sponsor. Which is probably why we weren't too worried. If it weren't for them and if we were in the same state as every year, would we have responded differently. We wouldn't know, would we?

And then there was another, a corporate to whom we had only sent the participation details. The lady who called asked us to send her all the sponsorship package details. We did. And never heard from her again (we probably should take a closer look at the sponsorship document to see if there is anything that puts off people). A couple of reminder emails later, she at least confirmed that one team would participate.

We also wrote to a few companies outside of Hyderabad - again, for participation. One person we heard from was wonderful - he said he couldn't send outstation teams because of the travel costs involved; but he would definitely look into some kind of sponsorship support. Promptly the sponsorship package details went to him. He wrote back, thankfully - putting us on to the HR at their Hyderabad office. Well, they didn't really agree to "sponsor" the event, but upped their participation from 3 teams last year to 6 this year. Better still, they actually qualified for the early bird offer, but when they made the cheque they plain forgot about it. We pointed out the mistake, but they weren't too worried about it. We had no complaints, of course!