Just a friendly reminder:

We are seeking literary and creative work for this year's edition of the Cincinnati Durga Utsav brochure. Please submit your original short stories, essays, poems, sketches, pictures, recipes etc. , not exceeding 2000 words, using email, post or in-person to Smita Sengupta, 4419 Meadowbrook Ln, Mason, OH 45040.

Please send us any special news about your children and family that you would like to share with us. 

All submissions will be checked and approved by the Pujo Committee. Let us know if you have trouble sending the file due to its size and format. 

15 more days are left before the early-bird rates expire. If you have not registered yet, you can do so right here. If you are not a member, please remember to order your own copy of the brochure while you are registering for the event.

Finally, donations of all amounts are welcome and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

We will be sending out volunteer sign-up forms soon.. please keep watching this space for more !

One of the CCI membership benefits is that, the print edition of the annual Cincinnati Durga Utsav brochure is distributed at no extra cost to the members, during Durga Puja. For the rest of the attendees, a downloadable pdf version was made available on-line for a limited period at our website.

While the brochure has always been rich in content, over the years it has also improved in quality. For the past few years, the brochure is being printed on high-quality glossy paper from a professional printing house and can legitimately vie for table space in our living rooms.

We have received inquiries from many attendees in the past about how they could have a copy of the brochure. Every time, it is with a sheepish grin that we have had to respond that an online copy is downloadable from the website and the print version is only for the members ! This year, it will be a thing of the past. You can order a print copy of the brochure while doing your Puja registration and we will have a copy available for you to pick up at the event !! Each copy is available for $5 which will cover our production costs partially. We will have a very few extra copies available at the venue for purchase at a slightly higher price. So, if you want to order a brochure, please do so now instead of waiting for later.

We hope this approach will ensure that anybody can have the brochure while we can control our expenditure by printing the right amount of copies needed. 

Hello all ! Thanks to all those folks who have already registered for our flagship event this year - the 9th Cincinnati Durga Utsav. Just a quick reminder to those interested in attending  - our pre-registration rates are now open and will be effective till September 15. We request you to register at the earliest to take advantage of the pre-registration rates. You can register using our secure online payment options available in our website at www.cciorg.com.

The brochure that we publish during the event, is much sought after by the attendees. Printed in high-quality paper, it has several literary contributions from the community apart from the attendee directory. Thus far the print edition of the brochure was made available to the members only, while the rest of the community had access to the PDF version on our website for a limited time. This year, non-members can also order the brochure as part of the registration process and be a proud owner of one during and after the event is long over. Here is our 2014 brochure for you to check out:

Speaking of brochure, we are taking literary contributions from the community at this time. Please send over your short story, artwork, poem, essay or anything else that you want to share with the community to our brochure team leads. You can find the brochure team leads in our Durga Puja team web page here.

Last but not the least, if you want to actively participate in any of the organizing areas, please contact the team leads here ! We welcome anybody and everybody to be part of the process. We can guarantee that you will have an enlightening experience of what all goes on behind a successful event. Heck, you might even come to enjoy the controlled chaos, the meeting mayhem and the background bickering that are part of any democratic organization. At the end of which, we all stand tall and united as CCI family - steadfast in our objective of the only annual Durga Puja in Cincinnati and of course, all the socio-cultural activities through the year.

Every year Durga Puja brings us sweet reminiscences from Bengal - the sound of dhaak, to the hustle-bustle of ladies trying to do their last minute shopping, to the smell of dhuno and fragrance of shiuli.
 
This year, on the auspicious occasion of Durga Puja, we are planning to put together an eclectic presentation, a platform for all passionate dancers, singers (classical, semi-classical and folk), actors, poets, musicians, fashionistas and painters to come together, through an unique event called SPECTACULAR INDIA.

In keeping with the occasion, the theme of the event would revolve around “Shakti”. We would like to include as many interested folks as possible in this project. All local performing arts schools & institutes are welcome to participate in this novel presentation.

We have only 5 weeks available for rehearsals. If you are interested in participating, and are able to commit to attending the rehearsals, please contact Jaya Sen or send in your requests via the CCI website here by August 30th, 2016.

Well, that is kinda dubious headline for a blog, but that is exactly how we feel this morning ! Why so ?

This week our annual Cincinnati Durga Utsav posters have come up in the Indian grocery stores in Lexington, KY !! Many thanks to our "extended" Outreach Team ! We expect to have some of our friends from Lexington to join in the 3-day festivities with us. We are working out group rates for our out of town friends, with some nearby hotels and will update through this page as soon as we complete the negotiations.

​We are also seeing tremendous response from the community in donating to CCI and we have raised (including pledges received) more than 5000 dollars through individual contributions so far ! We are very thankful to all those generous individuals. And a big shout out to our Fundraising Team for reaching out and following up with the donors !!

We take this opportunity to call upon the larger community to consider a donation - no amount is small - that will go towards building our corpus and providing our organization the much needed flexibility in organizing different kinds of cultural and charitable activities in future. You can donate through our website www.cciorg.com, our facebook page @hellocci or simply by clicking below! Help us get to our target and beyond before the end of this month ! 
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​Like every year, the practice weekends are here when the community members gather across the town in small groups to rehearse their performances and most importantly have some fun in doing so !

Here we capture some lighter moments when the theater actors got together to rehearse their lines from a purely light-hearted comedy that is slated for the stage during Cincinnati Durga Utsav 2016. We look forward to seeing you at the event and enjoying this play that deals with the plights of the younger siblings in getting their dada married and what follows thereafter !

The pujo committee has also been busy working with the various teams in planning what is undoubtedly the biggest event of the year for the community. We are looking at building up our corpus substantially so that future Board of Trustees have enough flexibility to organize a grand 10th year Durga Puja in Cincinnati in 2017 and beyond. We have set an audacious goal for ourselves and it is indeed heartening that committed individuals have come forth in making substantial donations to the cause.

We have already achieved more than 1/3 rd of our initial target as of today and we hope to meet and exceed our target through generous contributions from the rest of the community. 

If you have been around the town visiting Indian grocery stores, you would have seen the Cincinnati Durga Utsav posters have been put up in the past week !! Thanks to our Outreach Team who went around putting up posters and collecting advertisements for our CDU brochure.

​Online registrations have already started pouring in! Many thanks to those who have registered at the early bird rates, using our secured online payment features. These rates go up on September 16th; while that's quite a few weeks away, we do request that you register at the earliest opportunity to help with the planning/arrangements by the puja committee.

If you prefer downloading the registration form and mailing across the checks and forms to us, then you will find the form available for download in our Registration page. Payments by checks help us to save the commission that we otherwise have to pay on a per transaction basis. And those nickels and dimes have an uncanny knack of adding up very quickly.

Please continue to visit our website at www.cciorg.com or facebook @hellocci, for puja donations and registrations.

The events calendar is filling up pretty quickly for us in the Cincinnati area making the remaining days of summer even more enjoyable and fun-filled.

India's independence day is being celebrated on August 14th at the Hindu Temple of Greater Cincinnati. If the weather gods do not play spoilsport then this event promises to be a lot of fun with kite making and kite flying in the plans. More details here.

The independence day celebrations continue with another event scheduled on August 21 in Cincinnati downtown. The event "Namaste India" will be celebrating the rich, ethnic, and cultural diversity of India through a unique blend of music, dance and other forms of art. More details here.

For the theater lovers, August 21 is also when Spotlight, Columbus is hosting the South Asia Theater Festival with stalwarts from India - Meghnad Bhattacharya and Mahesh Dattani directing a Bengali play (w/ English super-titles) and an English play respectively, to be followed by a musical directed by Kaustavi Sarkar. More details here. [The organizers are extending discounted tickets to CCI members subject to some minimum attendance - so please let us know if any of you are interested in attending]

With all these fantastic events lined up, not to speak of the regular puja committee meetings and rehearsals, the coming weeks are promising to be fun and eventful indeed !!

We are excited to release a new version of our Cincinnati Durga Utsav 2016 web site ! 

Online registration and sponsorship options for Cincinnati's only annual Durga Puja are now available ... please use these to pre-register or sponsor at attractive rates! Pre-registration continues till September 15, after which rates will increase.

Over the next several weeks, we will post frequent updates of different activities in preparation for this flagship event of our community. Keep visiting this blog. Post your comments. Get involved. Participate.

We look forward to seeing you and enjoying the fun times together! ​