Dancing to the tunes of eastern winds
This year most of us decided to skip SEF and instead go back to GCA. The reasons were plenty as given in this post.
I think it turned out to be a good decision. We had good attendance from KV on all 3 Sat GCA Dandias. On GCA’s part looks like they reserved the best for the last. Rutul Dave’s Eastern Winds featuring our own Nitul and Parikshit (third weekend) was just awesome followed by Sharvari Dixit (second weekend) while Dimple Patel’s group (first weekend) was a total flop.
Nitul and Parikshit and the whole Rutul Dave group provided the best Dandia music of the year. It was simply hard to stop dancing. And they went on till almost 1 am. The photo above is from dancing in the ending stages of Eastern Winds music.
On their part, GCA did a very nice thing to distribute the Dandias throughout bay area instead of just having it at one place. Gave some variety as well as more people could attend also whenever Garba was held near their residence.
In fact GCA regained some of its lost glory during third weekend when the first parking lot became full and other parking lots had to be used.
It was also cost effective for many families since GCA membership is cheaper than going to individual dandias.
It seems that SEF had a bigger place to play as well this time. They had a L shaped hall at Santa Clara Convention Center. Not totally sure whether the volunteers were still enforcing dancing in the big circle instead of forming your own group.
There is still Falguni Pathak to look forward too and she could be hard to beat as well. 🙂 But for the time being GCA was paisa vasool and there is still the Holi Garba in March to look forward to.
It were the magical hands of Nitul and Parry….our feet just had to dance…and did not want to stop….
Well done Nitul, Parry and the group.
Here are some photos from Navratri 2010 which includes KV photos also:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dimprash/sets/72157625286050010/
Prashant,
You need to post the Falguni Dandiya review, to complete the article of Navratri 2010 🙂
Ok. here is the falguni pathak review:
The event was mismanaged w.r.t. ticket distribution. Folks who had purchased ticket online had to wait in queue for 45 mins to collect their ticket. That is simply ridiculous. I thought that there would be much more crowd for Falguni Pathak. But the rear side of the hall was more or less empty.
The music itself was great with Hindi songs and Gujarati songs. It was really hard to stop dancing. :-). However the PreetySha group which plays in SEF also comes pretty close to Falguni Pathak Dandia. If you managed to attend SEF then you are ok. :-). And plus SEF is cheaper than Falguni too.
It would have been nice to have the entire KV dandia team there. But we still had quite some KVites to form our own circles. We even managed to grab Falguni’s attention. 😉
As compared to 6 years back when Falguni had come to Oakland Arena this time there was plenty of space to play. So that was good.
The water fountains were a problem but that is a problem of Santa Clara Convention center and not of Falguni. There were long lines for water fountain since the flow was low and only 2 water fountains were working.
So the final ranking of course is (from high to low) :
Falguni
GCA – Eastern Winds (Nitul/Parikshit)
GCA – Sharvari Dixit
GCA – Dimple Patel
I guess as per rules of elimination we can say to Dimple Patel “You are fired” !!! 🙂