Anjali - Daksha School's Annual Day 2016

The month and a half long daily grind of rehearsals that spread into precious weekends finally came to an end. Anjali, a big one for secrets, kept me out of the scheme - I was to know what she was doing only on the day of the program. There were small updates about how this one did at rehearsals and how that one reacted and all that but not a clue about her act. Finally, December 14, 2016, and we landed up at Ravindra Bharathi at 9 am, Shobha, Satish and me, to drop her off and find ourselves seats up front from where we could better enjoy the show.

The Vakratundaya performance by class 3  - Beautiful

The seats at Ravindra Bharathi, specially the one's that are behind the first four rows or so, are designed for people who are severely malnutritioned. We quickly found seats up front and waited rather uncomfortably for an hour. In the other seats I would have slowly got suffocated. The show started a few minutes behind time which is a first because Anita is a stickler for time. Now the school is up to fifth class and is no longer what we were used to in the earlier years - there are hundreds of students and parents and grandparents.

That's INDIA - Anjali is the cross line in N

As usual the first acts were really cute. The really small ones come all dressed up and look stunned at what was going on. Then they act in the way only they can. Its an absolute pleasure watching them. The theme was India - living dreams, clean and green, festivals and traditions, strong and fit India, salute to the armed forces, a tradition of music and dance and unity and brotherhood. There were a couple of cute skits, a mime show. Anjali participated in the dance by her class, announced some other program for another class and participated in the last act. One nice thing about this year was that the children from the 4th and 5th compered sections of each act.

The Unity Act by class 5

Despite having seen performances live and on TV we were still highly impressed by the senior acts - one by the class 3 where they performed to Shankar Mahadevan's Vakratundaya which was outstanding, one which was Anjali's class performance which was quite graceful, the finale which was quite impressive again and even the one with the armed forces. The mime was well performed as were the skits. Fantastic show by the choreographers and the kids.

Another year goes by and one can sense the growth of the child over the years. The shy little toddler now talking confidently in front of an audience and performing with no inhibition. Nice.