More than 100 million people across India will take a dekko at an Indian emblem, a winning Google doodle, on the search engine’s homepage Children’s Day Nov 14, the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
The doodle, “A Prism of Multiplicity” showing a football player, a kathakali dancer, gold jewellery, a peacock, a farmer and flowers, was created by Arun Kumar Yadav, a teenager and a student from Chandigarh.
Yadav was declared winner of the Doodle4Google contest, which received 200,000 submissions from 60 Indian cities.
The winning entries were announced at a small picnic-cum-felicitation ceremony at the Rail Museum in the capital.
Three teenaged students, Vasudevan Deepak from Kozhikode, Shravya Manjunath from Bangalore and S. Preetham Paul from Visakhapatnam, were the winners. Their doodles will be uploaded on a site called Classmate, and accessible for viewing on the search engine.
The competition was judged by a two-member jury comprising cartoonist Ajit Ninan and actor Boman Irani.
“The theme for this year’s competition was ‘Unity in Diversity.’
Political cartoonist Ajit Ninan, an avid “Googler”, said his professional life was woven into Google.
“My day as a cartoonist starts with this Bible, Google. There is no time for reference or visual dictionaries in the ‘sabzi mandi (vegetable market)’ of Indian politics. All the information is available at the click of the mouse,” Ajit Ninan said.
The Doodle4Google competition was instituted four years ago to encourage children to take up creative work, Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director, Google India, said.
“We are also promoting art awareness through Google. The search engine has tied up with 41 countries under the Google Art Project to bring the best world art to more than two billion Internet users. Art is the least accessible of all other genres,” Anandan said.
“You can visit the best museums in London and Paris with your computer — without moving out of your home,” Anandan said.
