GURI, a charitable organization that works towards the holistic development of specific underdeveloped areas, held its inaugural fundraiser on Saturday, June 22, 2002 at the Keefe Technical High School in Framingham, MA. The event featured the wonderful local light music band, Saptaswar.

The program began with UmaYellamanchi, a GURI volunteer who spoke about a specific Guri project for which the fundraising was initiated. “We have identified a village in Andhra Pradesh by the name of Penugolanu and are planning to undertake several projects in that village including education, providing roads and other facilities that can bring about the total development of that area”, said Uma.

“Guri” is a Telugu word that means “Target”. The idea behind Guri is to target specific underdeveloped areas and to bring about the holistic development of this area. “We hope to make these development projects as models that can be replicated all over India”, said Prashant Nerram , one of the Guri volunteers.

“Guri USA, started just a year ago and already has branches in Maryland, Washington DC and Texas”, said Rama Rao Vutukuru, the founder of Guri, USA. “Guri hopes to be a catalyst for change by making development possible in all areas including education, agriculture, transportation, water resources, health etc.” The chairman of Guri, India the sister concern to Guri USA which works on implementing the various projects, gave an overview of some of the tasks they have undertaken. "Guri acts in partnership with the development schemes that have instituted by the government. For example, the government has funds to hire teachers for a school in Penugolanu but was unable to fund the complete construction of the school building. Guri was able to build the school", he said.

Saptaswar provided the entertainment for the evening. The music was wonderful. The talented musicians provided a treat by singing many of the hits from the Indian film world. Their repertoire was amazing for they sang, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam songs. Sudha Rao, one of the lead female vocalists who singing was superb, sang the different paragraphs of the song “Manohara” in three different languages. Amazingly, the transition from one to the other was completely seamless. All the musicians were well trained and talented. They also seem to have a lot of respect for each other and for music in general. Some like Venkat Dayanandan added a little histrionics to the singing that brought a lot of life to the presentation. The audience was very taken with the presentation. “I loved all the songs! It was awesome. I felt like dancing ,“ said Divya Pattisam, a 12 year old who was beaming with delight at intermission

The orchestra had a large number of instrumentalists, which made it very special. Kumar Padmanabhan and Christy Mathew played the keyboard while Vitthal Bhakta and V. Suryanarayanan played the harmonium and violin respectively. The rhythmic accompaniment was provided by Mahesh Lachyankar(Tabla), Sumanth Shankar and Pragya Bhushan(Drums) and Ishwar Patel (Dholak). Pankaj Kanth and Amit Singh played the Guitar. Smita Jani, Arti Nair, Kavitha Narayan, Sudha Rao, Krithika Srinivas, Meena Sundaram, Prashanth Arram, Venkat Dayanand, Achuth Menon, Vasanth Murthy, Abhin Nair and Manav Shah were the vocalists and Geetha Mahadevan was the Audio technician. Congratulations are due to Mohan Somasundaram for identifying and bringing so many exceptional artists together and presenting a wonderful show. The hour delay at the start of program kept me from being able to attend the whole event. But whatever I did hear was simply superb.

To find out more about GURI, please check out their website at http://www.guriindious.org

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