We hope you’ve all had a good break over the festive and holiday season and are looking forward to new beginnings in 2016. On behalf of "I for India" community, we would like to convey our greetings and best wishes to all our patrons and readers for a very happy, healthy and successful 2016 !!!
It was a pleasure to welcome and meet with so many of you at our End of Year Extravaganza. This was our largest face to face gathering with around 500 attendees and therefore was a great opportunity for us to personally meet and interact with many new patrons. Equally we hope this event also gave you all attendees the occasion to broaden your social network with new acquaintances and friends made at the event.
As with all our other events, this newsletter would cover a summary of the recently concluded New Year’s Eve event and then focus on our first event of 2016 in February !
We’ve always upheld time discipline and hence were pleased to commence the event sharp at 6:30 pm as planned. Our sincere thanks to patrons for their timely arrival and making this possible ! Sathish Duraisamy then quickly got onto introducing the core leadership team of "I for India", which was especially useful to the newbies to our event.
Given the majority of young parents amongst our patrons, children have always been a focus in all our events. Hence the event began with the first hour dedicated to our little guests. Tom Kent enthralled the children with his bag of tricks, including some interactive magic, good humour and participation from the children, and balloon modelling with every child in the audience receiving one.
With the children all in good humour now, it was the turn of adult patrons to be entertained. The stage was taken over by London Beats team, who had also specially flown in alumni from overseas to join in the orchestra. Their program was presented in two acts, with a dinner break in between. The first half nicely built up the musical atmosphere with nostalgic melodies across Tamil, Hindi, Telugu etc… the second half accelerated the mood with peppy songs and fast dance numbers, finishing off with a non-stop multi lingual medley in a true live orchestra jamming style !
It’s not very often that one gets to experience an Indian live orchestra band in the UK and hence their show was truly a special treat to the audience ! Many of us now so used to hearing Karaoke track singing as the only musical event in the UK would have experienced the difference this brings and appreciate also the painstaking efforts involved in terms of rehearsals, logistics with live musicians, instruments etc.
Our special thanks and gratitude once again to each and every member of the London Beats team for this scintillating and memorable musical evening!
No Indian event is complete without a hospitable meal and the New Year’s Eve had also made grand arrangements for dinner. The audience was treated to a sumptuous buffet dinner in the large Marquee adjacent to the hall in a wedding style party dining arrangement, with a fully enclosed passage from the hall to keep it warm and weather proof for our patrons. Special thanks to Tilda for their generous provision of “Tilda Grand Extra Long Rice” towards the Pilav rice at dinner.
Following dinner and second act of London Beats, the raffle prize winners (1 FIRST, 2 SECOND & 3 THIRD prizes and also special prizes by our sponsors Tilda and Samudraa) were announced by Sriv Venkatesh, Sridhar Balachander and Ramki Krishnamoorthy, which included branded headsets, Android tablets and an LCD TV. Sharath Kumar Sekhar then closed the formal proceedings of the night with the vote of thanks. Our sixth team member Karthik Raghavan could not be in attendance that evening as he is directly leading the flood relief efforts onsite in Chennai, which we covered in detail in our update in end December.
Following the vote of thanks the stage was handed over to the DJ and the dance floor now fully opened up to the audience who merrily danced away until New Year 2016 was rung in with a countdown cheer from the entire audience !
We are truly humbled and pleased with the smooth conduct of an event of this scale and once again wish to thank all our patrons for making this happen. Our heartfelt thanks and gratitude once again to our event partners (Nakshatra Hall, Rathigas, London Beats, Tom Kent, DJ Prakash), as well as sponsors (Lebara TV, Tilda, Xend Pay, Asset India, Not my Fault Lawyers, Auto Express, Contractor Financials, Samudraa Arts)