Saint Louis: Telugu Association celebrates Sankranthi

ST. LOUIS: Telugu Association of St. Louis (TAS) celebrated "Sankranthi Sambaralu" at Mahatma Gandhi Center on Saturday, January 19 with great enthusiasm and fanfare. Around 250 people participated in the event. The celebrations started with opening remarks by TAS President, Chandrasekhar Gummi, followed by various cultural performances by both children and adults. Competitions were held for the most beautiful "Muggu" (colorful floral designs) and the tastiest "Pongali" (a sweet made with rice and lentils). Prizes were distributed at the end of the event to all of the performers.

The event was followed by an authentic Andhra dinner. Local Priya restaurant sponsored couple of food items for the event.The festival of Sankranthi (or Pongal) is one of the most colorful and popular festivals celebrated with a lot of enthusiasm and fun with family and friends, all over India. It is a three-day event, which takes place in mid-January.

This is a festival mainly for farmers who harvest their crop and enjoy their produce. In Andhra Pradesh, the first day of the festival is called Bhogi, the second day Sankranthi and the third day as Kanuma.

Courtesy: IndiaPost

Telugu Association cultural festival showcases folk art

COLOURFUL SHOW: Artists perform Keelugurralu (dummy horse dance) at the Telugu cultural festival in Chennai on Saturday.

Chennai: The Indian Telugu Association will showcase folk art forms of Andhra Pradesh at a grand cultural festival in T. Nagar on Sunday and Monday.

The festival was inaugurated on Saturday by Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly Speaker K.R. Suresh Reddy. Artists performed the ‘dummy horse’ dance and kolattam.

Kalidas, a fire-eating artist from Ongole, was dressed in a Goddess Kali costume complete with a garland of skulls made of thermocol and a trishul. Folk art has been handed down for several generations in Kalidas’ family His 13-year-old son, Praveen Kumar, donned the costume of a ‘rakshas’ (mythical demon). The rakshas towered above the audience as he walked on stilts.

G. Rajalakshmi, a resident of T. Nagar, was overjoyed to watch folk art performances she had seen when she was a little girl in Palakonda village in Srikakulam district. “It’s been so many years since I saw something like this. It’s rare to see such a variety of folk art,” she said.

About 200 artists will exhibit their skills in traditional music and dance forms. Some of them said they worked as agricultural labourers because patronage for folk art had diminished.

Chindu Yakshaganam, Tholubommalaata, Jamukala Katha, Oggu Katha, Kolaatam, Dolu Vinyasam, Burrakatha, Veerabhadra Vinyasam, Keelugurralu, Maragaallu, Puliveshalu, Dappuvinyasam, Garadi Pradarsana, Jaanapada Naatakam, Annamayya Keerthanalu and Baindla Kathalu are some of the folk art forms to be performed from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on both the days.

The venue is German Hall on Habibullah Road. Entry is free.

Courtesy: The Hindu

సంక్రాంతి కవితలు

http://telugutanam.blogspot.com/2006/01/sankranthi-poems.html

Make way for Telugu blogs

HYDERABAD: Ganapati is a farmer from Tanuku, West Godavari, overseeing his work and also sharing farmer-related information sitting in Hyderabad through his first farmer-oriented blog రైతే రాజు (Rythe-Raju).

Non-conversant in English, Ganapati had no idea that one-day he would become the first farmer to maintain a blog for farmers, that too in Telugu.

These days, he is passing-on whatever new techniques of horticulture he is learning, through his blogs, to his farming counterparts. “It was last year when I came across an article on Telugu blogs. I noted down the blog addresses and visited them. The persons who maintained the blogs helped me to write in Telugu,” he says.

Thanks to the growing interest in IT among people from other walks of life, it has become easy for people like Ganapati to maintain Telugu blogs, writing and uploading Telugu articles in Wikipedia, forming Telugu chat groups and finding technical-support to ‘tweak’ windows and other operating systems to transliterate Telugu.

“Eighteen months back we started sharing information on how to make computer write Telugu by using English keyboard. Now, there are 3,000 active contributors to Wikipedia and 1,000 dedicated Telugu blogs,” said Chava Kiran Kumar, a software engineer blogging as ‘chavakiran’ at blogspot.com.

There are host of blogs dedicated to help first time users who do not know how to blog in Telugu.“For the uninitiated, it may take some time to get the hang of it. One can visit lekhini.org and he can straight away start writing in Telugu,” said another blogger, Veera Venkatramana, blogging as Veevan.

The websites useful to visit: Etelugu.org, koodali.org, computerera.kodali.org for technical support, lekhini.org for typing in Telugu, http://groups.google.com/group/telugublog for access to Telugu blogs and http://te.wikipedia.org for Telugu wikipedia.

Courtesy: The Hindu