Child for Child programme works towards instilling a sense of empathy amongst children from the privileged community. The programme also aims at making the youngsters more conscientious towards underprivileged children and the community around them in general. With the start of a New Year children wanted to set a base for an exciting 2021. So, to continue with the momentum Smile Foundation’s Child For Child programme organized an event. Ring in 2021 was conducted on the 28th of January.
Competing for a Cause
In the New Year we wanted to talk about Earth Foundation’s mission for 2021, “Restoring Planet Earth”. Smile Foundation has in the past organized many environment related campaigns. Most of them were conducted with underprivileged children associated with its Mission Education centers. Often these children have organized plantation drives and environment conservation campaigns. All these were done in association with children from privileged schools. Therefore DPS East, Bangalore found it extremely interesting to organize an event around environment. They believed, empathy towards the immediate surroundings would be a huge takeaway from the event for students.
Gearing up for the Challenge
The event comprised a competition in Fancy Dress, Dance & Song for children from Nursery to class VIII. The team decided to focus on little children and their parents. The children were keen to participate in the Fancy dress competition. They had to make their costumes from reusable and recyclable materials available at home. So, this led children to start rummaging through all the waste materials within the confines of their homes. They worked doggedly with their parents to come up with the most innovative costumes.
The judge for the day was Ms. Arjita Chauhan works in the field of eco-friendly ready-to-wear Indian garments. In spite of that she found it extremely challenging to pick out the winners. All children along with their guardians put their heart & soul in preparing costumes. Waste paper bags, polybags, newspapers, leaves from trees, disposable crockery & cutlery etc were used for the costumes. The message of “Restoring planet Earth” was emulated profoundly. One example is of a child who had prepared a paper dress. Decorated it with teak tree leaves and made a little speech around the importance of preserving teak trees. Another one had dressed up as a cat and spoke about how protecting animals from extinction was just as important as protecting trees and plants.
The Contest
The song and dance categories were filled with elements of entertainment in the day long event. Therefore we were treated to some excellent forms of dance. Ranging from classical like Bharatnatyam & Kathak to Folk like Gidda the children were at their best. They even presented contemporary choreography on patriotic numbers. We were then regaled by high school students. They sang some extremely soulful numbers.
Results
Finally, there were multiple winners for each of the top 3 positions in every category. Special mentions for diligent performers were also announced.
The winners for the fancy dress competition are Krishvi Dave (1st position for Anti Plastic costume), Moulik Khatri (1st position for Good Earth & Dirty Earth costume), Anshika Shekhar (2nd position for Anti Polybag costume), Rikesh (2nd position for Protection during Covid costume), Akshara Aravindakannan (3rd position for 3Rs – Reduce, Reuse & Recycle costume), Aaradhya Prashant Sarpatwari (3rd position for Solar Panel costume) and Special Mention for Advita Pandey (for Honeybee costume) and Ritvik Reddy K (for Biodiversity costume).
The winners for the dance competition are Swasti Deepa Sahoo (1st position for Odissi), A G Sadhana (2nd position for Bharatnatyam), Prabhleen Kaur Saini (2nd position for Gidda), Siyashree Mishra (3rd position for Odissi), Ashmita Ananth (3rd position for Bharatnatyam) Special mentions for Eshan agrawal (Contemporary choreography) and Shyam.S (Hip Hop).
The winners for the Song competition are Uthra Ramkumar (1st position for Raag Majdar), Abhishek Bhat (1st position for Sri Ganesh Vandana in Sanskrit), Medha Deshpande (2nd position for Raag Malkauns), R.Sreelekha (2nd position for Song from Bombay – multilingual), Nanditha Mavath (3rd position for Jaan Nisar) and Sujai Aravindakannan (3rd position for Patriotic number )
Our heartiest congratulations to all participants and special wishes to all who have occupied the first three positions and special mentions!
