This year, city Keralites to celebrate Onam on virtual stage

Ludhiana: This year Onam celebrations will take place with the help of technology as the members of Kerala Kalavedi Club have decided to celebrate this festival on a virtual stage. The idea is to bring the young, old on one platform for enjoyment. In the previous years there used to be celebrations on a grand level, where Keralites used to participate in various activities. Now, due to increasing Covid cases, gatherings could not be planned, so they have come out with the holding of virtual competitions.
The members claimed that these days children remain busy with their online classes, mobile games or television, so in order to engage them in certain activities they are planning these virtual competitions. Moreover, when Onam celebrations used to take place efforts were made to keep the young generation aware about the rich traditions and rituals of their culture.
Earlier, there used to be gatherings of 1,500 to 2,000 people, who used to have lunch together while women used to perform on stage all dressed up in traditional dresses. In the virtual competitions too traditional dresses and dishes will be preferred.
General secretary of Kerala Kalavedi Club Parsanna Kumar said, “From next week the online competitions will start, for which our people are already doing rehearsals. People will stay at home and make videos of their activities and then upload those videos. We have a panel of judges and on the basis of performance we will give results.”
He said they would give prizes to all participants. He further revealed that there were competitions in categories like cookery competition, Malayalam speech contest, stand-up comedy, online dance competition, teacher-student competition while for small kids there was fancy dress competition.
Another member of club K Babu said, “For the cookery contest only traditional Malayalam dishes will have to be prepared and similarly in dance there will be traditional dance items only.” He said earlier they used to organise this on a stage, but these days gathering is not allowed, so virtual celebrations have been planned.
He further said it will help in bringing families close. He said children would enjoy a lot as these days there were no schools and studies were also online, so there would be much fun. “Moreover, now we get free from office by 6.30pm, so we also get enough time to spend with family members and help them in their rehearsal,” he added.