The village temple festival and the school annual day

The quarterly exams were over but holidays were not declared. The school had to celebrate its annual day on October 4^th. The children would be practicing dance and drama. At least the selected ones, the rest would just laze around and play games.

They needed two chief guests for the annual show. They decided on the district education officer and Mudit Jain the President of DCW.

The headmaster knew the DEO and the village reporter Ganesh knew Mudit Jain. The DEO agreed immediately. Mudit did not know. He told Ganesh that he would let him know. The villagers were not willing to wait as invitations had to be printed and sent all over the country. 

They kept harassing Ganesh till he said yes. He was confident that Mudit would make a special trip from Bombay just for him. He was wrong. Mudit refused citing work.

So the school Correspondent S.Rajarathnam decided to make do with the DEO.

The temple was all decked up. The land around the stage in the field was smoothened, raised, cleaned. Sankaran who paid for the stage also paid for the land leveling. Murugesapandian was in charge. His wife was the Panchayat President.

Then the posters for the event came from Coimbatore. The first controversy started. Ganesh wanted to know why individual names were printed on the poster when the event was a village one.

Murugesapandian clarified that the names of the donors for the band in the evening were printed. Senthil is a contractor. A building contractor. He belongs to the neighbouring nalumadi village. As he has constructed lots of houses here too Prabhakaran asked him for a donation. He agreed and so his name was also on the poster. No problem with that. The problem was that his village was shown as PanickaNadarKudieruppu.

This the villagers did not like inspite of the fact that Senthil was the grandson of the Bathakaraiswamy temple which was going to witness its annual festival now.

People were waiting for Rajaratnam to come to complain. Lights had been put up all over the village and also decorative arches.

The villagers waited for the people to come in from Bombay, Madras, Coimbatore, Bangalore and Bhilai in Chatishgarh. The festival is on October 2^nd and the annual day on 4^th.

More on that after it happens.