2020 is an extraordinary year so far. Essex Indian is a registered charity based in UK and have a track record of working locally and globally with community cohesion and cultural awareness programmes within community. Recently they organised the Generation Next Festival encouraging children and young adults to be part of cultural heritage and focus on project related to global causes.
They have successfully staged various shows like Post office, Thousand cranes, Evolution, Showers of peace, Heal the world and 4 -Acts. This year they celebrated the theme of world and future leaders in global virtual platform through live streaming on Essex Indians’ Facebook page and YouTube link .
Children and young adults across the globe took part in it and reflected on their thoughts through interactive discussion and performances. More than 60 performers took part across the globe including India, Bangladesh, UK, Europe, Australia and USA. It was eight and half hours nonstop thought-provoking discussions and performances. Participants were from different economic backgrounds with the same plea for a better world.
Distinguished panel members from different professions of life shared their thoughts on challenges of Generation Z and impacts of adult behaviour. They covered a wide variety of theme starting from Covid pandemic to lockdown, caste and racial discrimination, domestic violence, economic recession, black lives matter, Homelessness, social media, crisis in civilisation, age of distraction, global warming, pressure on youth, educational pressure on children, air pollution, modern day definition of Feminism, artificial intelligence, kindness, exploitation of animals by human, definition of roots and origin, family time and its importance and social media and its impact .
Coordination and virtual platform support was provided by Astral studio led by Samriddha Ganguly, Baishali Bagchi and Dr Anirban Mandal. The programme was wonderfully compered by Dr Arpita Ray.
Also to purely boost everyone's morale in these trying times Essex Indians organised a Global Fantakshari and 12 participants from across continents were invited to join each preliminary episode. After 5 gruelling prelims involving 55 contestants/teams, 12 contestants qualified for the grand finale which was held on Saturday 28 June 2020.
Three semi-final rounds were conducted from which 4 contestants were selected for the finals. Ms Ratna Parikh from round 1, Dr Queen Aditya from round 2 and Dr Shalini Agarwal and Drs Rupalee and Suresh Mandke who were joint winners of round 3.
The 4 teams fought it out in the gruelling final round. Apart from the usual Antakshari rounds, there were pther rounds.
The competition required deep knowledge of Bollywood and at the end everyone enjoyed to the hilt.
