Virtual Musical Talent Show

You may have attended the live program streamed directly through zoom and Nepali American Center (NAC) Facebook on Saturday July 11 from 7PM. This first of a kind unique entertaining event was dubbed as “Virtual Musical Talent Show”. This event needed both the hard work of many volunteers for several months with clear insights to navigate it to an exhilarating finish. NAC senior vice president Ankur Sharma is a very dynamic community leader possessed with multi-talents. Like in the past, he again took the responsibility to lead this effort. He assembled a strong team of volunteers and performers to bring a fully online live entertaining and informative presentation . The team took over the charge of this first-in kind e event and navigated it from a sketchy start to surprisingly unprecedented success.

The  primary focus of the show was to identify and bring forward  distinct talents present among the community members. The  secondary objective was to try to engage everyone  during  pandemic COVID-19. A list of features presented in this event were:

1. Talent shows consisted of four age groups: Under Five, Six to Ten, Eleven to Fifteen and Above Fifteen. A total of 68 quality entries were submitted..
2. Recognition of winners and gift cards to the first, second and third in each of the category 
3. Songs from popular singer Nalina Chitrakar and local talents Shreya Thapa (Iowa), Niraj Shrestha, Jagadish Yadav and Biswas Pradhan from Chicago and Sudin Amatya (DC)
4. NAC’s yearly Chicago Chautari Times (April 2019 – March 2020) recognizing all the participants 
5. Recognition with presentation of gift card to High School and College Graduates  2020

Interested participants could submit their interest in different categories such as:  songs, dance, poem reciting, and others. These decisions were communicated via various media including viber group messaging, email, Facebook and NAC website. We received 68 quality entries, 10 submissions were in the Under Five category, 32 submissions in the Six to Ten category, 10 submissions in the Eleven to Fifteen category and 16 submissions in the Above Fifteen categories. There were participants from Chicago, different parts of the USA as well as Nepal. 

All submissions were obtained using online entries. Everyone in the community was requested to vote  her choice online with each person to vote once to any of the submissions. NAC audience as per the request and the order of the ranks of the talents in each category were decided by counting the final number of votes received for each submission. The first, second and third winners in each category were awarded e-Giftcards. All the entries except the Above Fifteen category were also given consolation eGift cards. NAC is happy to inform that nearly 4000 audiences across the globe attended the show. Hopefully, all those who watched it found it extraordinarily entertaining. 

To commemorate this one of a kind event, a team of volunteers also published a special souvenir named “NAC Covid-19 Yearbook”. Our effort  was to make this memoir publication reflective of how  all of us handled the challenging situation of COVID pandemic. We strongly feel that this will be very  interesting to our  children and grandchildren in the years to come. There were greeting messages from all our supporters  as the main part of this Yearbook. It also included descriptions of various NAC’s activities since its inception. The name of the entries and winner from each category is as below.

Age group 5 and below:

Age group 6 to 10:

Age group 11-15:

Age group 16+: