..naming the name

We 'the team' sang, chatted and jammed. And decided to launch the band with a big bang at the dawn of the New Year. All of us agreed that we should come out with a live dance show on Dec 31st. And now what should we call ourselves? Again we had tons of ideas - some pretty serious, some hilarious and some boring. We agreed and disagreed. One thing we all consistently agreed was that we should not be yet another name. We want to be different and our name should reflect that. With all due respect to the 'ragas' ,'swaras' and other musical band names, we didnt want to be yet another musical name. Nope, am not going to share the list of names we discussed (saving them for future ventures, assuming success begets success) but our most popular ones came down to - Drumstix and Aavakai (see footnote for meaning). We had several arguments for and against each of them.

Thanks to our dear friend Siddharth, then came an offer to perform for a fund raising show for Sankara Eye Foundation in November itself. We got excited. Suddenly we couldnt wait till December. This is a perfect opportunity to perform as a team and that too for a good cause. It was time to put 'a' name on the flyers. Since this show is for a mixed group of audience and we will be performing mostly in hindi, we went with the neutral 'drumstix' name. The show was awesome (see my previous post) and people actually said they liked the name drumstix.

But a voice in the heart kept saying 'Go for Aavakai, Go for Aavakai' and we listened. We are Aavakai - we are traditional, we are contemporary, we are a rich blend of tastes just as music has so many elements. We mean telugudanam, we mean indianness, we mean tasteful music. We are Aavakai. Go Aavakai!

And here's our promise:
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Aavakai is zesty...so is our music!
Aavakai is seasoned...so are our artists!
Aavakai is divine...so will be your experience!
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p.s: For the benefit of those that dont know what Aavakai (also spelt as Aavakaya) means. Here is a snippet from wiki (http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Aavakaaya).
Aavakaaya (Telugu: ఆవకాయ) is a variety of Indian pickle popular in southern India with its origin in Andhra Pradesh. The main ingredients are raw, fully mature, fibrous, very sour mangos and Aavalu (mustard seeds in powder form) and a combination of other spices used for pickling.