Big rush for Kolams!

It feels good to know that the Kolam Contest of the Mylapore Fest is hugely popular.
In less than a week, registrations for both events - on January 6 and 7, had to be closed.
Volunteer Priya Ravi, who has played a key role in organising community events in her backyard in Kotturpuram, handled the registrations.

It feels nice to recall here of the time, over a decade ago, when the first kolam contest was held in the playground of Lady Sivaswami Girls School in the Chitrakulam area. When we found that the contestants grew restless while the judges had backstage discussions, we thought it would be a good idea to host two cultural events.

Since then, the contest has grown into a fest.

We had the entire North Mada Street to hold the kolam contests. Which meant that we had about 175 people creating what would become a carpet of kolams in less than an hour.
Some store owners on the street did not like the idea of closing traffic for an hour. So we had to respect those objections and narrow down the kolam space.
Now we can accommodate about 125 people. And that includes about 20 children.

So all those who did not get to hear of the kolam contest in mid- December, had to be disappointed.
We feel bad about turning them away.
Perhaps you may have a solution to this - how do we accommodate everybody in the Mada Streets area?
Write to us now!