Sweden Crown Princess Victoria gave birth to a boy on March 2, 2016 at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm at 20.28. The baby weighed 3.6 kgs, a perfectly healthy boy. Later, a beaming prince Daniel, in a press conference, broke the great news for the benefit of the people of the Sweden. The country plunged into celebrations instantly.
Europeans celebrate the Royal occasions as festivals with all fervor as if it’s their own. Here in India, occasions of births in the families our neo-royal families ie presidents, prime ministers, chief ministers, ministers, MPs, MLCs etc are not celebrated nation-wide or constituency-wide. They go quite un-noticed. Now, in a slight departure, Ugadi festival of Telugu people, is going to be an occasion for a birthday celebration in Andhra Pradesh, for the first time.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrabbu , who is adept at grabbing the limelight by organizing spectacular celebrations, this time round, finds Ugadi is the best bill to celebrate his grandson Nara Devansh first birthday. Cute Devansh, on that day, is going to be blessed by all sorts of ‘politicians’ of Andhra Pradesh.
Why Ugadi?
Government has decided to celebrate Ugadi as the state-festival on April 8. The recent cabinet meeting passed the resolution to celebrate the festival in such a grand scale that every aspect of the celebration should reflect the Telugu Culture. While Chief Minister himself will officiate the Vijayawada state celebrations, all the in-charge ministers will attend the celebrations at district headquarters as the state representatives. To add more color to the celebrations to Telugu New year day, chief minister Naidu will also launch a ‘new’ program, called, “Intinta Ugadi- Intinta Punadi”. This is a housing program, in which two-bed room houses (2BHK) would be built across the state. This is another duplicate of Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s pet 2BHK program. Naidu’s cabinet gave a nod to build six lakh houses for poor across the state. Naidu will launch the program on April 8, as part of the state Ugadi celebrations. The government idea, according to senior official in the department of culture and tourism, this year Ugadi will go down in history as a major celebration of modern Andhra. It would be more spectacular than the foundation-stone laying ceremony of Amaravati, which was graced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said.
Incidentally Nara Devansh birthday as per tidhi falls on Ugadi, they say. But no Telugu man celebrates birthdays as per the tidhis. Though we are Telugu, we are English at heart. To disprove this, Naidu is heralding a new tradition of celebrating the birthdays as per tidhis. So, Naidu is clubbing grandson’s birthday with that of Ugadi, which is already designated as state festival. On that all VIPs from government and TDP will make a beeline to bless Devansh. For the late comers, Devansh birthday had already been celebrated on March 22, in a star hotel in Hyderabad.
In fact, a senior party MLA told ‘telugu360.com’ that Devansh Ugadi celebration was decided long back. “During the Assembly sessions itself, Naidu had personally invited all the MLAs and MLCs to the birthday celebration of Devansh,” he said. This way, Andhra Pradesh people will have their first governmental celebration of birthday of prince Devansh, who is second in line, after his father, in the succession to the empire of Telugu Desam.
