Close to 300 people attended the 7th annual picnic of Friends of Madhya Pradesh New York New Jersey (www.FriendsofMPNYNJ.com) Saturday, September 28th at Rosedale Park in Pennington, New Jersey.
The weather had been rough and raining due to Hurricane Helene's impact, but it did not impact the spirits of the organizing team, and attendees. Despite morning showers, the Picnic had close to full participation, with many families on the waitlist.
Like every year, authentic Madhya Pradesh (M.P.) food made on location, and cultural and traditional activities were the highlights of the fun and activity-filled day. The day began with a breakfast of Indore’s traditional Poha, Jalebi and Saboo Dana Wada, and M.P.'s food delicacy Poori, Shrikhand and Halwa personally served at lunch by the volunteers.
The entire venue was decked in colors of ‘National Parks of MP’ with wildlife picture booths and placards. To ensure that first-time attendee families were comfortable, the team planned a ‘Host- Dost’ program, pairing new attendees with tenured families. Also, all attendees had name labels with their MP origin towns, so lots of past connections of school, colleges, native towns were found. Special all-day activities were planned by the volunteers for small children and seniors, including Antakshari, Musical Masti, Cricket, Little Master Chef, Tambola, and more. Despite the morning drizzles, the participants were very engaged all through and enjoyed the food, interactions, and games.
DJ Pi (Vivek Jain) also from MP played groovy music. Once he played “Gotilo”, people left their rain jackets, and umbrellas and started dancing in full abandon. His special soundtrack created just for this Picnic “ Poha Poha” has gone viral globally after the picnic launch.
The Indian Consulate and leaders of other community organizations conveyed their best wishes for this event. FMPNYNJ has been organizing annual picnics and other events since 2015. Managed totally by volunteers, the organization’s sold-out picnic has become a reunion for people from M.P. with people rediscovering and reconnecting with old friends and neighbors. Some of the volunteers who organized and managed the event were families of Jitendra Muchhal, Rajesh Mittal, Raj Bansal, Ajit Jain, Anand Rai, Amit Mishra, Shaman Jain, Akhilesh Laddha, Sanjay Modi, Sarthak Pathak, Kapil Samadiya, Manoj Kulseja, Ashish Vijayvargiya, Nikhil Sharma, Sonal Shukla, Vivek Jain and many other volunteers.
