Kshana - Moments of Happiness

Aashray Home in Bandra West was next on our ‘Spread Some Smiles’ List.

We started the event by having a quick game of ‘Four Corners’ and ‘The Newspaper Dance’. It was such a funny sight to see how the girls managed to balance themselves on barely one inch of the newspaper.

Post that we started with the main activity planned for the day, which was a game of Antakhshari. The girls divided themselves into two groups with a few Kshana members assigned to each team. One team named themselves as ‘Shining Stars’ and the other called themselves ‘Chak De!’. It got very noisy indeed when both the teams started cheering for themselves on the top of their voices.

The game of Antakhshari lasted for over an hour.  There were 5 different rounds of the game. The ‘Musical Round’ was considered as the most difficult round as the girls found it very tough to guess a song just on the basis of an instrumental clip that was played. The ‘Dum Charades Round’ had everyone rolling on the floor with laughter as one member of each team tried to act out the song given to her and then her team tried their level best to guess the song. The girls also enjoyed the ‘Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi Round’ where they were given the name of a popular Bollywood on screen couple and they had to sing a song which featured that couple. The Finale had the girls singing songs and dancing on them as well. This round was enjoyed the most by the girls. Special requests were made to have the Kshana members on the dance floor and we obliged :]

The DJ took that as a hint to start playing music. Needless to say that there was lots of dancing and madness!! The kids requested for all their favourite songs – ‘All the best’, ‘All is well’, and ‘Pappu can’t dance’.

The DJ reluctantly stopped playing the music when we started serving snacks — wafers, cupcakes, Frooti and chocolates. The kids passed the mike around and hummed their favourite melodies as the enjoyed their yummy snack.

Once they were done eating they called all the Kshana members in the room and thanked us. They presented us with a hand-made ‘Thank you’ card which was simply beautiful.

Photography was not allowed at Aashray but we left with the mental images of the smiling faces and a resolve to be back at Aashray soon.