MPMM Celebrate Festivities with its Annual Dal-Baati Picnic

HOUSTON: Madhya Pradesh Mitra Mandal (MPMM) organized its Annual Dal-Baati Picnic on Sunday, October 21 at Bear Creek Park in Houston, Texas.  This daylong picnic was attended by over 225 people, who enjoyed sumptuous food and entertaining programs.

Day started with the ever-favorite Poha-Sev-Jiravan-Jalebi breakfast. Special arrangements were made to procure Indori sev to have authentic taste. For lunch, everyone enjoyed charcoal grill cooked dal-baati – a specialty dish, prepared by attendees at the park. The food feast was followed by Sev-parmal and Masala Chai.

Attendees danced on catchy Bollywood numbers, performed skits, enjoyed stand-up comedy, and sang melodious songs and entertained everyone. Kids came dressed up in Halloween costumes and won prizes, adults enjoyed playing Bollywood Tambola.  New families were introduced in a fun way and played exciting games with involvement of audience. This event provided excellent platform for family entertainment and food delicacies.

This year, a couple of new additions were made, photo booth and live Dhol. MPMM team organized a photo booth with props & set built on MP/CG theme that included pictures related to MP/CG – poha-jalebi, celebrities, slangs used and famous places. Everyone danced to the live dhol beats from Dholi RAX, even doing Garba to keep up Navratri spirits.

This year MPMM welcomed many students from University of Houston who were from MP/CG. There was no entry fee for students and they really appreciate this gesture. It was a very nice environment for students as the event felt like a home away from home, especially when they don’t have family in USA. MPMM community entrusted them with a sense of social belonging in USA.
This event was organized by Ashish & Pallavi Jain, Gagan & Shilpa Pandey, Pradeep & Pooja Jain, Sanjay & Gunjan Gupta, Bharat Agrawal, Catherine Wong, Ashish & Mukul Kudariya, Aashish & Kuntal Mahoday, Manish Sharma, Pradeep Sharma, Nikhil & Ritu Jain, Ashish & Jyoti Bhandari and several other volunteers who pitched in with their efforts on picnic day. Their planning, hard work and execution made this picnic set a new bar in wholesome family entertainment.  A big thank you to all the volunteers, to Rahul Vijaywargiya of Humtumdesi for sponsoring prizes and to Navin Mediwala for capturing stunning images of this picnic.

Unlike in the past, response to MPMM picnic has been so overwhelming that RSVP had to be closed few days before the event, to ensure that picnic can be managed well.

MP Mitra Mandal is an informal community group made up of people who come from Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh states and reside in Houston area. These states reflect “unity in diversity” in true sense, which is visible amongst the people who attend MPMM events in Houston.  The group was started in Houston in 2001 by Ashish Bhandari & Nikhil Jain and has now grown to over 300+ families belonging to various cities like Indore, Raipur, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Bilaspur, Gwalior, Bhilai etc., more details are available at http://mp.aajausa.com MPMM events have been covered by various media groups in Houston as well as in leading news media in Madhya Pradesh.