COIMBATORE: The thirteenth edition of Coimbatore Vizha will start on Saturday and this time, due to the pandemic, most of the events will be conducted virtually.
Over the span of eight days, close to 100 events will be conducted as a part of the carnival.
With ‘hope and gratitude’ as the theme, the grand launch of the festival will include showering flowers on health workers at ESI hospital and Coimbatore Medical College Hospital (CMCH) on Saturday.
Health minister C Vijayabaskar and municipal administration minister SP Velumani will inaugurate the festival.
“Considering the pandemic, we thought of skipping the festival for a year. But several organisations voted in favour of conducting the event. In order to make it safer, we decided to conduct it virtually. The Vizha is the celebration of hope, resilience and a tribute to the people who made the year 2020 safe for us,” said Jayaprashanth Jayachandran, chair of Young Indians (YI) Coimbatore.
Aishwarya Arjun, past chair of YI, urged to show gratitude to frontline workers, health workers from CMCH and ESI hospital will be taken on a helicopter ride over Isha yoga center and Maruthamalai free of cost.
Some of the virtual events that are conducted as a part of the vizha are marathon, cyclathon, heritage tour, virtual art streets, agriculture and beyond – agriculture related webinars – and Mind your mind – mental health awareness programme.
To reduce the gap between urban and rural, students from rural areas will be assisted. “We have included an event called ‘Gift a device’ and public are requested to drop a used or old mobile phone at the boxes that would be installed at multiple places in the district,” he said and added that the devices would be handed over to deserving candidates after checking its quality.
Pointing out that several people who are native of Coimbatore, are residing out of the district, Jayaprashanth said, “For the first time, we are going to connect with them and include them in the vizha through an event called ‘memories of Coimbatore’. During the event, they would be sharing their memories connected to the city on social media platforms. We had reached out to alumini associations of several colleges and Tamil sangams across the globe,” he added.