January CCC, Sunday 10th 2016

CCC is SEVEN years old now and IMHO, that definitely deserves a longer summary so please beware!

What started as a small chamber event with 12 kids back in January 2009 has grown so much today. Our CCC children justify all the efforts as being worth-while by displaying astounding musical growth over the years! Thank you to one and all who helped shape CCC what it is today!

Our January event was indeed an emotional and fulfilling one and as always, we introduced a few new initiatives this year. It was a regular format event yet all the 23 children who performed did a fantastic job presenting sampoorna raga krithis in celebration of our seventh anniversary! Thank you teachers, students and parents for accommodating my request and making the event a special one.

SEVEN, I think is a big number in music, and in hindsight, I wish we had done a bigger celebration! However, the two new initiatives we introduced, Feature-A-Guru and Sangeeta Saaram Series thatwere well received compensated for it.

CCC is very grateful to Vidwan Sri Ravindrabharathy Sridharan (our Feature-A-Guru segment musician for this month) for his kind words about CCC and for sharing some short cut formulas that will be very useful to our music learning students. Sri Shivkumar Bhat presented a wonderful session to the 40 children who attended the new Sangeeta Saaram Series session and shared valuable information relating music with our children. He made it so interesting with appealing visuals and stories. We plan to offer these sessions every other month and CCC is again extremely grateful to Shivkumar ji for offering his time and sharing his knowledge for the benefit of our CCC children.

CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization and our volunteers are the BEST in the WORLD!!! Some continue to volunteer even after their kids are off to college! I am happy to say that every one of our core volunteers from 2015 is staying behind to help us in 2016 also! With all your continued support, we can make CCC even better for our kids. We would also like to welcome Srikanth Mahalingam and Jaya Ganesan to this core group as they joined the core team this year as volunteers.Thank you core team and I don’t highlight you as much as I should:

CCC Core team for 2016:

Venue booking/Event day lead: Mohan Vaidyanathan

Audio/Website/Tech in charge:Namdev Nayak
Audio team volunteers:Balaji Krishnaswamy, Gajapathy Kannan,Hari Kodungallur,Jayaraman Venkatramani, Ramchandran Iyer, Sam Ravindran,Sriram Iyer, Thyagarajan Swaminathan, Venkatesan Subbayyan

Membership coordinator:Latha Srikant

Photography/Video excerpts coverage/upload: Prasanna Narayanan

Powerpoint presentation during events: Uma Sriram (lead), Srikanth Mahalingam
Attendance volunteers:Latha Srikant, Veena Tirumalai, Sadhana Barath

Social media page (FB) coordinators: Radha Lakshmikanthan, Rama Ravi

Stage setup: Anand Gurumurthy

CCC website budding artist sectionmaintenance:Vaidy Krishnamurthy
CCC website Calendar maintenance:Gita Ramanathan

Sangeeta Saaram Series: Vidwan Sri Shivkumar Bhat (Presenter), Jaya Ganesan (lead volunteer)

Congratulations are in order to both Santhosh Ravindrabharathy and Avinash Anand (and their respective gurus) as they’ve just returned from India after completing their arangetram successfully. We’ve watched them perform and grow musically in CCC and this is indeed a proud moment for all of us that these boys did extremely well in their debut concerts in Chennai.

Many thanks to the parents of January performers who helped with event day setup/cleanup tasks. Thanks to Lakshmi, Sindhu and Bhooma for bringing tea for our volunteers and thanks to Jaya, Harini, Kavitha and our young volunteer Suchetha for helping with the prep work relating the Sangeeta Saaram series initiative.

Prasanna is back and that means, our pictures and videos are back as well! I am sure you’ll enjoy these photos and video excerpts from our event yesterday! Thank you Prasanna!

Please save February 14th Sunday (2pm to 5pm) for our next event.Wishing you and your family a very happy Makara Sankaraanthi/ Pongal!

Regards,

Padma Mohan