Billi ( बिल्ली )

Website for Billi Family Annual Braai Event

Cape Town, South Africa

With the great number of beautiful picnic areas they had access to and the great passion they had for the outdoor life, our forefathers regularly enjoyed picnics. The main benefits of this were the quality time family spent together and the bonding that came about as a result.

With families getting bigger, the frequency of picnics diminishing with the busier lifestyle, and newer generations preferring smaller and intimate picnics, there was a fear that the younger members of the family would lose the bond and estrange themselves from the wider family.

In the light of this, an annual picnic for the larger family was formalised and the 1^st Sunday of February of every year was reserved for this event. The 1^st formalised picnic event took place in 1988. We salute those who had the foresight to initiate this.

With over 20 years of successful events, a winning formula has been achieved in organising these events. Every year a new committee is elected by the previous committee to plan and organise the following year’s event. 

There are many benefits of this change of committee annually. It gives freshness to the event each year, maintaining the interest of all the family members, e.g. different venues, themes, etc.  It relieves any one particular committee member of the burden having to organise the event every year. Most importantly, the “organisation” does not assume the personality of a few committee members, which generally lead to “personality issues” and members resisting attending the events.

Another component of the winning formula is the personal hand-delivery of invitations to family households. To lighten this task, the household deliveries are divided between individuals or groups of committee members. Currently, we find a minimum of 3 groups/couples of committee members a practical size to take on the task without it being over-burdened.

In my own experience, I found receiving members to deliver invitation a pleasant experience, and this in itself a bonding one, as with our busy lives these days and with the family being large as it is, we are unable to socialise otherwise.  I can say the same for delivering the invitations. I also wish to take this opportunity to thank members for receiving us so warmly. The contributions are given generously, and up-front, irrespective whether the members can commit to attending or not, helping organisers a great deal in their task of putting the event together.

I have decided to create this website to capture this family-related information that is valuable to the family members, as well as, to make it accessible readily to the younger members, increasing their awareness of their lineage.

My intention is to keep a pictorial history of the “Billi Braai” events and to show lineage up to the 1940’s generation. Websites for lineage beyond this can be managed by the respective families (I don’t mind pointing the way how to go about doing this). I will be happy to put in links in this websites to access those websites directly. In this way the families have the freedom to post however many pictures of their cute babies and cute grandchildren on their websites as they desire.

In my quest, if you have any ancient photos of our grandfathers, and even great grandfathers, and their families, I would appreciate it if you could lend me these just to scan them. I will take great care in returning them in the original condition. Alternately, if you have scanning facilities, you can email me the images, as I can understand how precious such photos are. Other photos I would also appreciate, are those of past events (mainly the whole family group photo) with dates for the years I do not already have on this website.

Thanks to all family members participating in the Billi Family Annual Braai events.

We look forward to many happy future Annual Braai events.

-Naresh Chauhan
          January 2010