New Delhi/Dubai: Life is not only stranger than fiction but very unpredictable, and beautiful! This might well be the thought passing through the mind of Mohammad Basheer Abdul Khadar, the Dubai expat who was on board the Emirates flight EK521 which miraculously survived an air-crash as it made a rather magical landing following a technical glitch.
Indian national Khadar, the 62-year-old lucky survivor must have been thanking his stars for the way he cheated a certain death. As if that celebration was not enough, lady luck smiled, rather widely at the native of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.
Mohammad Basheer would dream of becoming Dubai Duty Free Millennium Millionaire. And for achieving his dream, he would purchase airport lottery ticket every time he would travel India. First 16 tickets did not yield a penny, but that did not deter his will and while on his journey home for Eid this year, he purchased his 17th ticket, his 17th attempt at the airport lottery.
Still basking in the celebration of being alive, Basheer was suddenly all over the news space of the world, being dubbed ‘the luckiest man alive’. He struck gold when his ticket number 0845 was drawn in the Dubai Duty Free Millennium Millionaire at Concourse A at Dubai International Airport, winning him a huge amount of $1 million just four months before his retirement.
“I live a simple life, and now that it’s my time to retire, I feel like God gave me a second life when I survived the plane crash, and blessed me with this money to follow all this up by doing good things,” says Khadar.
“I am blessed to have finally won with Dubai Duty Free. If you ask me about my plans, I obviously want to help the children in Kerala who are less fortunate than others and need some financial help and medical support. I want to go out and find people who really need help and give them money. I was poor, and I know what people go through,” he added.
The sudden fame and new found riches have not gone to the head of this gentleman as he confesses, “I will continue to work till I can. Nothing else can give you the satisfaction of your hard-earned money.”
//copy// indianewsdesk