For almost more than a month, she was participating in the qualifying rounds of their sports events, and as the final day approached, she was getting more and more anxious to win and when I dropped her in the morning, my advise was, don't worry too much - just give your best. And seems that gave her the confidence to win two medals in this mega sporting event of her school. The qualifying event ran for more than two weeks in their school premise but for the finals, they took all the kids to the Residential school, which has a big stadium, apart from many other facilities.
Since she was already in the finals, we decided to join them there, even though its almost 20 km far from us. This is the first time me going there, but the kids always go there for their yearly adventure camp, so they are accustomed. It's a massive campus sprawling over 49 acres of land, running fully residential course for students from classes IV to XII.
The stadium seems to be a huge one, and I was amazed to see a school maintaining such a huge facility so well.
Panoramic view of the stadium, the running tracks are perfect like a public stadium, and the big area inside is a football field, where they planned the cultural event. After exploring all around, we were fortunate to find out two seats in the front - left by two women. Even though the stadium has a large capacity, seems, many parent and their family joined, exhausting the capacity. To give you an idea about numbers, total number of kids participating would be between three to four thousand, but guests were more than double of that. Huge parking spots were arranged to allow parking of those many vehicles - more than 3000. And they school also arranged several types of snacks / meals at the venue for parents - a very profitable venture for them.
Chief Guest Sri Bhaskar Jyoti Sharma, Principal Secretary of Department of Sports and Youth Services and famous Olympian Srabani Nanda, well-known sprint runner of my state, inspired the kids with their energetic speech emphasizing the importance of sports on life for a disciplined life - something I always admire.
Our eyes were in search for our little girl and there she was sitting, waiting for the medals. The violet color shots she was wearing, helped us to recognize her from a distance of almost 200 ft.
Finally the moments of pride for her to achieve the medal - this will be a great moment to cherish forever - we were lucky to experience and capture these moments.
These were the champions striking gold in more than three events.
It was good to see their Principal delivering the final speech in a very short and compact message to the kids, to explore their full potential, during early childhood. And after that, the mega cultural event started, which continued till the evening. At times, we worry about managing couple of kids at home, the school managed so many kids so well, performing to their best.
Here is a short video capturing her participation and the final few minutes of closing ceremony - just see the kids energy level after performing for more than three hours, and that too, being on the ground since morning - these are the kicks of life that helps them build confidence, to face bigger challenges.
The theme of the cultural event was Panchakosha Vikas, a five-fold development concept from our philosophy for holistic development. They designed the entire event nicely, breaking into several parts, with nice costume matching for each group's presentation. A lot of planning, careful strategy, months of practice, guidance of their teachers can only make this possible. Let me present few pictures out of hundred of clips taken :
There was no way to know when her presentation would happen, and the only way to recognize her team was to by the costume, that we saw at home.
Black and white - here comes our gal, using the zoom to the fullest, we still could not figure out where she was, but the lady recognized her by moves - only a mother can do that.
Everyone had to wait for the final dispersal, and the kids sat on the ground on their designated place, till evening.
They followed all the practices like Olympics to close the ceremony, and organized the kids with their class teachers after which we were allowed to enter the field and bring our girl.
She wished, had their team done better, they could have got the gold medal - goal set for next time.
On our way back, the traffic was crazy taking more than a hour to get out of that place alone but it was fun seeing people chasing each other - I had to play my part while she and the lady enjoyed. Even though we packed some snacks for her, when we came across a shopping mall, she picked up a well deserved pizza.
Though she has got many medals in academics, this is the first time she got medals in sports and it has supercharged her to do more for which I always have support.
Hope this post gives you a photographic journey of the event, however, if you want to experience the full video, then the school also live telecasted the event on youtube, massive amount of equipment were in action for that. You can watch the full video here :
Shot with SONY α6400 with 18-135 mm Zoom Lens
copyrights 
