Abu Dhabi: An Indian expatriate who became a multimillionaire on Sunday said he “knew he would win a lottery” one day.
“I have been buying this raffle draw ticket for the past two years and I had a gut feeling that I would win the prize one day,” Sreeraj Krishnan Kopparembil, 33, told Gulf News on Monday.
“That is why I was buying it often, and my gut feeling became a reality on Sunday,” said Kopparembil, who won Dh7 million, the biggest prize in a raffle draw of Big Ticket at the Abu Dhabi International Airport on Sunday.
Winning the prize would not make any immediate changes in his material life but it has already strengthened his inner life. “Nothing … but I always believed that what we need to do in life is just be optimistic and positive.”
His gut feeling on winning the prize one day was part of that conviction. “Now life has proved that my belief was right. This has further strengthened my belief in optimism and positive attitude,” said Kopparembil, a shipping coordinator in the capital.
However, he also believes that one cannot nurture such optimism and positive attitude in life one fine morning. “I have been building such an attitude since childhood and living with it,” he said.
In the last two years, he spent Dh3,000 in buying tickets costing Dh500 each. He had once purchased a Dh1,000 Dubai Duty Free raffle ticket and invested around Dh3,000 in National Bonds, a saving scheme that offers raffle draws with cash prizes.
This was his second raffle draw win in the nine years he has spent in the UAE. While working in Fujairah, he won a Dh15,000 in a raffle draw of a money exchange centre.
A Commerce graduate, Kopparembil earns a monthly salary of Dh6,000 and his wife, Ashwathi Sreeraj, 26, is working as an administrative assistant at a private firm.
The couple from the south Indian state of Kerala do not have any big plans in life. He had taken Rs2.5 million (Dh137,759) loan to build a house in 2015. “Repaying that loan is the first priority. The rest we will think about later,” he said.
He always felt that the UAE was a land of fortunes because many of his compatriots had prospered after coming here. “Now, my experience further proves it, this is indeed a land of fortunes.”
“We got this fortune because of working here. We will continue working here,” he said. He will invest the money wisely, he said, adding that, “I cannot imagine living without working.”
