Children's Day:
Pune schoolgirl's Google doodle on Assam
Pune schoolgirl's Google doodle on Assam
NEW DELHI: A doodle by
a Pune schoolgirl artfully depicting the natural and cultural richness of Assam
has been featured today on the Google India homepage on the occasion of
Children's Day.
Vaidehi Reddy, a class
IX student of Army Public School, was adjudged the winner of this year's India
Doodle4Google (D4G) contest in which there were more than a million entries
from over 2,100 schools across 50 cities.
The winning doodle
titled "Natural and Cultural Paradise - Assam" in which Reddy
depicted the state's famed wildlife by sketching the one-horned rhinoceros, the
tiger, tea bushes and bamboo trees. A woman performing the Bihu dance carrying
a 'japi' (traditional hat) is also there in the doodle.
"I want to go to
Assam because it is rich in both, natural beauty and culture. Its music and
rich folk arts are also very good," Reddy said in her caption in the contest
which asked the participants to draw their own doodle about "A place in
India I wish to visit".
Her entry was selected by a jury comprising political cartoonist Ajit Ninan, Art Director Children's Publishing at ACK Media Savio Mascarenhas and Google Doodle team lead Ryan Germick.
Her entry was selected by a jury comprising political cartoonist Ajit Ninan, Art Director Children's Publishing at ACK Media Savio Mascarenhas and Google Doodle team lead Ryan Germick.
The doodles were
judged on three criteria - artistic merit, creativity and theme communication.
Doodles are the
spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo in celebration of
holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and
scientists who have helped shape history.
Since 1998 there have
been over 2,000 doodles on Google homepages around the world. Themes based on
India have featured on the Google page umpteen number of times and more
recently on occasions like R K Narayan's 108th birthday (October 10) and the
Lok Sabha elections counting day (May 16). Independence Day and Republic
Day are featured every year.
On August 4, Google
paid a tribute to legendary singer-actor Kishore Kumar on his 85th birth
anniversary by dedicating a special doodle to him.
The doodle showed the
late music icon's sketch replacing the L of 'GOOGLE' and borders with drawings
of masks, pen and paper, camera and symbol of music, depicting his versatility
as an artiste.
In 1998, Google's
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin placed a stick figure drawing behind the second 'o' in the word Google as a
message to users that they were "out of the office" attending a music
and art festival.
From there the idea of
decorating the logo to mark cultural moments was born. Users really enjoyed
this quirky change to the clean Google homepage. As a result a turkey was added
on Thanksgiving in 1998, two pumpkins for the 'o's appeared for Halloween in
October of 1999 as well as a few others.
After two years of
playing around with the logo on special occasions, Larry and Sergey asked
webmaster Dennis Hwang to create a doodle for Bastille Day in France. Soon
after he was appointed the chief doodler and doodles became more frequent
occurrences on the homepage.
Users started seeing
doodles for more holidays and starting in 2003 doodles for people's birthdays.
The first being Monet in 2001, Picasso in 2002 and then Michelangelo and Albert
Einstein six months later. Since then the amount of doodles and the variety of
subjects have grown to celebrate a much wider array of events, holidays,
anniversaries and birthdays of some of history's greats
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