The 13{+t}{+h} edition of the Sundaram Finance Mylapore Festival will kick off in the city on Thursday.
Promising an exciting line-up of activities, the festival organisers have planned heritage walks, cycling tours, chess tournaments, kolam contests and performance of traditional art forms, over the four-day carnival.
For Vincent D’Souza, director of the festival, it is the spirit of community the festival embodies. “The fest brings together people by using the public spaces of this ancient neighbourhood creatively, through activity-based programmes. You see Mylaporeans increasingly identifying strongly with their locality,” he said.
S. Sivakumar, vice-president of Sundaram Finance Ltd., said, “The festival started as a mere kolam contest in Mylapore in 2001, but has now grown into an integral part of the Margazhi season. It is almost like a modern, urban thiruvizha .”
As much as the festival celebrates the locality of Mylapore, D’Souza underlines it is also about its people.
He says, “It is the people that make a neighbourhood. Our award, which recognises people who have become icons of the neighbourhood, is only an effort at affirming this sense of community. We also have a social history project which we are hoping to start soon, to record the experiences of senior citizens who have lived in Mylapore for decades. Through this, we hope to capture the everyday histories of an area which otherwise could be lost forever.”
