Archive > TAR Canada

TAR CANADA 2 Contestants - Shahla Kara and Nabeela Barday (Best Friends)

<< < (2/3) > >>

Leafsfan:
Amazing Race a "roller coaster," says UTSC alum
When Season Two of the Amazing Race Canada kicks off Tuesday, Nabeela Barday, a UTSC alumna (BBA, 2007), will be one of the 22 contestants travelling to picturesque locales to take on arduous challenges.

Barday, a Toronto-based consultant with Accenture, joined forces with her childhood friend, Shahla Kara, to compete for the grand prize, a package that includes $250,000, pickup trucks, gasoline and airline tickets for a year.

“Shahla came to visit me last year when I was working for Accenture in Haiti, and we travelled through Panama together,” said Barday. “She suggested applying for the Amazing Race Canada, because we travel well together and our skills are complementary.”

Barday is a planner, while Kara is more of a risk-taker. And although Barday had never seen an episode of the show, she knew about the concept and agreed to help Kara fulfil her dream.

The women, who are both children of immigrants from East Africa, thought it would be a good opportunity to showcase their lives as outgoing, single Canadian women of the Muslim faith.

“I think it is a great platform to give visibility to our faith,” Barday said. “I think the show demonstrates that it is okay to be who you are.”

The travel necessitated by the script was wonderful, too, said Barday, who has visited more than 30 countries already.

“The opportunity to see our beautiful country was remarkable on its own,” she said.

Will she win? Barday knows the answer, but she is sworn to secrecy. Although she can’t reveal details of her adventures before the show airs, she is “absolutely glad I did it.

“It is grueling, it is a competition and we were racing against some very, very good competitors,” Barday said. “It was an emotional roller coaster.”

Source:http://ose.utsc.utoronto.ca/ose/story.php?id=6169

Leafsfan:
Ousted 'Amazing Race Canada' pals speak out
CP: Shahla, obviously you had a painful experience with the water challenge. Can you take me through what happened?

Shahla: We had just done a firefighter challenge, which they didn't really show too much on television, and it was an hour and a half of being in that firefighter suit and wearing that oxygen tank. And I think there was a leak in my mask and I was just so dehydrated from that challenge that going into that ice-cold water kind of just destroyed me, especially when we dropped that piece in the water and I put my head underwater to get it, all of a sudden I started losing feeling in one side of my body and I couldn't feel my legs.

Just being a therapist and knowing that there are things that can happen to people's bodies, you just kind of panic at that moment. We had to take a penalty.

CP: Nabeela, Shahla praised you on the show for being so supportive while she struggled. What was going through your mind when you knew she wouldn't finish that challenge?

Nabeela: Shahla was the one who originally proposed the idea of us going on "Amazing Race" together. She was like, we're great travel buddies, we're both adventurous, let's try to do this together. So when we were in that tank and she just said, "I can't feel my body," I looked at her, and I knew how passionate she was about doing this. I said, you know what, if you can't do it, it's OK. It's not worth causing a physical injury for this.

CP: But I understand it was actually you who got injured?

Nabeela: What happened was we got to the naval base and we hopped out of the raft and I actually tripped on the raft. It was a very silly trip. I didn't realize at the moment what had happened but I had actually gashed my leg to the point where it required eight stitches. But I ran on it, we did the firefighting challenge, we went into the tank. And it was only after when I changed my clothes that I realized that I had a four-centimetre-deep gash that required (stitching).

But adrenalin is this amazing thing where it can numb certain emotions.

CP: There was an exchange with the twins (Pierre and Michel Forget) where they kind of implied that you were flirting with them. I'm wondering if you could address that?

Nabeela: (laughs) So we were both sitting there waiting our turn to go onto the zipline and it was just a casual exchange of conversation. And I was genuinely intrigued as to whether their business, which is an abattoir, actually served and had halal meat. I guess somehow it seemed to be portrayed that I was flirting. But I was genuinely just interested in their business!

Source:http://www.insidehalton.com/news-story/4621846-ousted-amazing-race-canada-pals-speak-out/

Leafsfan:
 

Interview with them: http://kelowna.myezrock.com/newsfeed/2014/07/09/chilling-end-for-best-friends

Leafsfan:
Ruth Myles: Shahla and Nabeela on what went wrong for them on The Amazing Race Canada
The dream of winning The Amazing Race Canada went down the drain for Shahla Kara and Nabeela Barday on Tuesday night’s second season premiere. I caught up with the Toronto-based pair as they shuttled between media appearances Wednesday morning to talk about what went wrong in the flood training simulator.

Question: Who and where did you watch the premiere?
Nabeela Barday: We watched it with friends and family. Right now we are practising the month of Ramadan, which is 30 days of fasting, so our first meal of the day happened to be right around 9 o’clock Eastern Time, so we got to have our meal and watch the show all together.

BFFs Shahla Kara, left, and Nabeela Barday learn they are the first team to be eliminated on the second season of  The Amazing Race Canada.
BFFs Shahla Kara, left, and Nabeela Barday learn they are the first team to be eliminated on the second season of The Amazing Race Canada.

Q: How hard was it not telling people how you did?
NB: It’s been tremendously difficult! The first challenge was not to let people know that we were even participating in this. I took a leave of absence from work and I was very hush, hush about what I was doing. For friends who asked, I just said, ‘Oh Shahla and I are travelling.’ But unfortunately, we didn’t align our stories very well. She said we were going to South Asia, and I said we’re going to South America. If anyone had really thought about it, they would have put two and two together.

Q: How was your experience on the show different than what you thought it would be?
NB: I think I had underestimated how difficult it would be to be on a reality TV show. By that I mean a camera monitoring your movements, a microphone recording everything you are saying.  . . . You are thrown all these curveballs from all sides from what your competitors are able to do to how you react to TV to the challenges where you don’t know what to expect.

Q: How did you prepare to be on the show?
Shahla Kara: A little bit of working out, here and there. I think a lot of this Race is mental. You have to prepare yourself and you have to prepare to win and to do challenges that you never expected. . . . We looked at past seasons of The Amazing Race, but as you know, nothing is ever the same with the Race. They are always making it challenging and unique every season, so there’s only so much you can do. But Nabeela and I talked about things so we would be on the same page, like what we would take penalties for.



Q: Which brings us to that flood training simulator. Walk us through your experience with that.
SK: Yeah, it was lovely! No, it was challenging. We had a firefighter challenge previous to that (which the audience didn’t see) and it took us quite a while to do that. By the time we got to that tank, I was dehydrated. After that piece fell in the water, I had to go under to get it. I think because my head went underwater, my body started shutting down because I didn’t have anything left. But we tried our best. After the first time, we tried, but after that piece went down again, it was almost game over at that point because Nabeela is scared of confined spaces and I was not up for going under the water again.

Q: Did you learn anything about yourself?

SK: Of course, you learn your limits. For something to be my dream, to be so crazy to be on The Amazing Race, and then to have to take a penalty is something that you never want to do. But at a certain point, your mind kicks in and says, ‘OK, your body can’t handle this any more. It’s time to take a penalty.’ We thought maybe non-elimination, but that’s really rare on the first leg of The Amazing Race, although it has happened before! We were really hoping for that.

Source:http://blogs.calgaryherald.com/2014/07/09/ruth-myles-shahla-and-nabeela-on-what-went-wrong-for-them-on-the-amazing-race-canada/

Bookworm:
While I liked Shahla & Nabeela, I feel like either they or the editors or both focused too much on their Religion rather than their personalities.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page