Deepavali of 2008 has been more remarkable than many other years that I remember. While it was the ‘thala deepavali’ for Priya & Ashwin (though Ashwin was away in Germany), it’s the first when Seema & Abhay have been in India, together. The whole family came together to celebrate it, particularly Praachi, after many many years. This years October has had more holidays than any other year that I remember. Also the year that I spent a bagful to get a handful of crackers. Its truly been a festival of lights.

Praachi with Giri

Savitha

Priya and Praachi

Sanje - Lit with Deepas

Mom - Lit the flower pot

Abhay's Flower Pot

Savi and Sanju enjoying sparklers

Savi and Sridhar enjoying sparklers

The Nilaya Family

The Nivas Family

The Sisters

When I was casually looking at the news alerts in ndtv.com, one thing caught my attention was the “Go Green With Noddy” Contest. It was a contest for writing/painting Green stories around “Noddy & his friends”. Now that fascinated “ME”. “ME” not in the actual sense but “ME” playing the role of “Mama” to Sanju my cute little daughter. I always had this small pain in my heart about how much of less time I spend with Sanju. I wanted to do something for her.

Noddy Live @Bangalore

I quickly registered for the event, and even booked our seats for “The Noddy and the Treasure Map” –Live Show – Bangalore @ Ambedkar Bhavan, on Sept 7th 2008, a Sunday.

All of us, Sanju, me and Sridhar sat that evening and created a green story for the contest “Noddy and his Electric Car”. I still remember, me in the kitchen and Sridhar & Sanju in the hall. Me giving ideas and Sridhar using his skills to pen it down. Ofcourse, Sanju giving ideas of the dramatic events and suggesting the other Noddy friends as casts for the story.

Finally we finished the story and uploaded the same at the NDTV website.

Now was the next task, the task of creating a picture of “Noddy- in his Green Adventures”. I had downloaded pictures of Noddy, his car, the elves & tessy bear, so that we could use them while drawing the picture. We drew the picture of Noddy and Tessy Bear in their electric car & the Elves in their petrol car, coloured it and then uploaded that too to the NDTV website.

Sanjana

All of us were expecting Sanju to be one of the lucky contestants to win a prize……. But we had to wait…….at least till the end of September to know the results.

Meanwhile, Sridhar wanted to book this domain savithasridhar.com, that we could use to post our blogs, family albums, etc., just a hub for the family. And I was already thinking up on where to start and how to start, what will be the first blog post and so on.

On Oct 1st 2008, Sridhar forwarded me a mail written to him by NDTV personnel congratulating Sanju for being one of the top 10 “Go Green With Noddy” contest winner. The next thing I did was calling up Sanju (Sanju had a holiday because of Eid) and sharing this nice thing. I sounded more happy and enthusiastic than Sanju. At last….. we had won the contest….. I feel less guilty now that I don’t spend lot of time with Sanju … I very well know Sridhar and me spend a lot of quality time with her…….

And what a way to kick start our site…