Parties were never this easy to pull off!

Picture this. It is your birthday and you are upset that your friends and family are too busy to spend the day with you. So, you decide to go watch a movie by yourself and guiltily wolf down a bag of butter popcorn in the dark. The movie flickers off the screen and there is a ten-second slideshow that wishes you a happy birthday and at the same time, your near and dear ones excitedly jump out from behind the plush curtains, screaming ‘SURPRISE!’ As tears well up in your eyes, you begin to notice that there are members from the theatre cafeteria coming out with a cake. What an overwhelmingly eventful birthday it could be! This is the kind of scenario that the people at OMG Makers, a first-of-its-kind Surprise Planners in Chennai are looking to create. When Sharran, Vimal and Rupesh, who had already been in the event management business for a while now, wanted to do something out of the box, their creative juices got flowing. “We wanted to make people feel special on any day, not just an anniversary or a birthday, and when the idea developed, the concept of a surprise planning venture came about,” explains Rupesh. The trio got together with other friends Kushboo, Falguni, Chandni, Prashanth and Sairam, to launch the company earlier this year. With the kind of expertise some of their surprise parties are planned with, every little detail, including contracts with hotels, theatres, etc, intact, one might think of them to be MBA graduates with a couple of years experience in the management field, but believe it or not, these guys are college students, school drop outs, artists and what not. The company provides a number of packages to their clients, depending on the price range, which can vary anywhere between `3000 to `2 lakh. Their most popular package yet has been the Rhythm Package, which is the most basic. “We get a cake, a bouquet and a musician, who will wake the person at midnight to surprise them (for the basic package),” explains Rupesh. The best they have to offer to their clients is the Up in the Air package, where the party-goers are sent off on a helicopter trip around the city. Rupesh clarifies that they are different from event planners, because their primary job is to introduce the surprise element alone, but on request, the team at OMG Makers will also plan the entire party. So the next time you want to give your loved one the time of their life on a special day, but have no time to get into the nittygritties of a surprise party, you know what to do! prashanti@newindian express.com