IndianTelevisionAcademy.com

The Event
God Created Woman…
GR8! Celebrated Womanhood…

Come to think of it…

To God goes the credit for creating Eve, but – and we say it even at the risk of sounding blasphemous – to GR8! goes an equal credit in creating some of the biggest celebratory eves year after year for God’s Eve!

These GR8! eves are a salute to the glory of God’s Eve, or in other words of the entire womanhood, whose symbol Eve has always been! And the GR8! eves have a name – The GR8! Women Awards, wherein all the sterling attributes and achievements of women from various walks of life are put on a pedestal!

Each year, these Awards accord recognition and honour to the pluck and panache of Women, who have etched out an identity of their own on the walls of time!

This Event has multiple layers to it!

It serenades the Beauty of a woman… it trumpets the triumph of a woman… and it salutes the savvy of a woman! This dream and an almost compulsive-obsessive mission of Anu & Shashi Ranjan (Editor and Publisher of GR8! respectively) touched the 9th year of its highly celebrated existence. Over the years, it has conferred honours on the greatest of them, like Asha Bhonsle, Amrita Pritam, Waheeda Rahman, Mahashweta Devi, Sonal Maansingh, Sheila Dixit… and so on!

But that’s not all!

Threaded into the Awards is ‘beti’, which is a movement against the scourge of Female Foeticide rampant all across the country, today. This heinous practice is playing havoc with the Gender-balance as created by Mother Nature and ‘beti’ is a clarion call for awareness about this cursed mindset!

And this entire endeavour of Awards and ‘beti’ has won the implicit trust of one and all over the years and the Event is always awash with the illuminati from all walks of life!

But really – how times pass!

It seems only yesterday when the first GR8! Women Awards felicitated Kareena Kapoor as a Young Achiever. Today, she is a huge Star and has become the ‘Face’ of the Film-industry and akin to her, the then fledgeling GR8! TV Mag has grown on to become the Voice of the TV-fraternity!

And the same mercurial time stood still on the evening of the 26th of February as laser beams bathed the stage at the ITC Grand Maratha Hotel in Mumbai and this incomparable Eves’ eve got off to a flying start before the glitterati from Films, Television, Corporate, Public Life and what have you!

The opening act of the evening was an electrifying Ballet, recounting the tale of Shakti, the Mahishasur Mardini. It also set the perfect Sur for the Ceremony that was a bow to the glory of woman power!

From then onwards, the evening was a spectacle of rare razzle-dazzle. Its whole veneer had a shimmer and sizzle, what with that colourful décor and that breathtaking laser-bathed set. Enhancing the spectacular impact were terrific performances by a host of stars of the small screen, besides Arshad and Dia Mirza of the big screen.

The two were there to promote their film, ‘Hum Tum Aur Ghost’. For this they presented performances replicating the fun as well as the spooky ambience of the movie. So while the ever efficient Arshad shook a rocking leg, Dia, too, was at her seductive best!

Apart from the winsome twosome, there were also the likes of Jaswir, Aditi Gupta, Neha Marda, besides the pick of last year’s Dance India Dance – Salman, Mayuresh & Siddhesh. All of them broke into a jaunty jig to pulse-pounding music, sending the audience in a tizzy!

But the piece-de-resistance of the evening was a dance tribute to this year’s GR8! Golden Laurel winner, Asha Parekh and we had today’s TV nymphets bringing back the hypnotic aura of Asha Parekh’s dances like, ‘Raat Ka Samaa…’, ‘Bangle Ke Peechhe…’, ‘Aaja Aaja Main Hoon Pyaar Tera…’ and so on, while the still stunning veteran sat there totally overwhelmed with nostalgia!

Besides these rollicking performances, another highlight of the evening was actually a coincidence!

Can you believe it – a charisma of sorts happened in the form of a Beauty barrage therein. To everybody’s enthralling surprise, there were 12 Miss India’s brushing shoulders at the event and needless to say, that made a big feast for eyes.

Of course, the mainstay of the evening was the Awards, whereby one after another Woman Achiever ascended the stage to be decorated with the GR8! Honours in categories varying from Science & Technology, Directing, Medicine & Health Care, Corporate, Dance, Social Service and what have you.

But the crowning glory of the evening was when two women (one a girl, actually), who have become the symbol of Women-courage today, were honoured!

In a stunned hush, everybody heard Kashmir’s Rukhsana Kausar recount her skirmish with hardcore terrorists and how she took them head-on single-handedly. She ended up killing one and injuring the other. Coming out of a girl, who has still not moved off her teens, it left all of those present speechless.

Many an eye went moist with pride!

There was also deafening applause when Javed Akhtar gave the trophy to Aradhna Gupta, the one who after a relentless, gruelling struggle has at last been able to bring to the book that nefarious molester of her friend Ruchika, SP Rathore, despite his big connection with the powers-that-be!

Besides that, there were other captivating moments galore, like Saroj Khan’s Seetee, the teary celebrity moms on stage, and, of course, those tender, emotion-laden acceptance speeches by the strongest of women!

This year, GR8! floated a special contest for The Best Short-film on ‘Beti-Foeticide’ in association with Aaj Tak that carried an award of Rs. 1,00,000/-. It elicited tremendous response and more than 250 films were entered by young film-makers of all hues and from all the nooks and corners of the country.

The winner was Vardhman Saxena from far-off Shajapur in Madhya Pradesh. The audience clapped lustily after his 45-seconder Short was screened at the Event!

A visibly moved Anu Ranjan was heard saying – ‘I feel so humbled by this electric response to the Awards and to ‘beti’! We will go the whole mile for ‘beti’ and do whatever we can for changing the feudal mindsets that lead one to kill one’s on flesh & blood just because she is a daughter!’

Indeed, ‘beti’ stirred deep emotions in people that night! With anger welling up in his eyes, Arshad Warsi hissed – ‘The perpetrators of Female Foeticide should be castrated!’ And an incensed Sushmita Sen was even more precise – ‘Kill ’em!’