Onam - 2014

    Manju, a neighbor at Duckpond informed Divya of an onam programme in the area run by the 'Gama' association - Georgia Atlanta Malayalee association. We had mostly not heard well about these associations.We decided to try it out anyway.
    We reached the venue , which was a school,  around 1:30 PM which was when the 'Sadya' was coming to a close. The 'Sadya' was arranged by 'Lekshmi's Kitchen' , the same hotel that took up Anoop Sebastian's new home dinner. We just got paper plates as we were late. As Niya's experience of Onam was the primary motivation for trying this out, we got her a plantain leaf on special request.
We just had rice,sambar,avial,cabbage,samiya payasam and one more other payasam - did not even match the number of items Divya had made single handedly two onams back when we invited Sajan's family and parents over!. To add to that, while we left in the evening, we were so hungry that we took a stop at the Dunkin donuts and everyone was munching in quick. However, the items were tasty.
     While we were finishing up the Sadya, the 'chendamelam' started and Amey clearly enjoys percussion. While we were worried, he would wake up and cry, he was instead shaking his head to the drum beats and enjoying himself.
    Next, we were inside the school auditorium. Various families who were actively involved in the organization of the events were presenting dance/music performance items, mostly by the children. The setup was pretty good with a decent auditorium , nice stage , nice audio system - nice chance for the kids to perform. Performances were mostly nice from the perspective of these being just regular families and not artists per se.
     Amey cried to the extent that I had to leave the auditorium to fresh sunlight and fresh air in the open hall outside. And we would have left early except that Niya was dancing and running around happily with other kids her age.So we stayed till the end and towards the end, there was a single male song performance of 'Sankarabaranam' which was the highlight of the day.
     It was a nice experience on the whole though and most importantly , Niya had a great time!