Gwen Stefani met Bollywood at the annual South Asian Students Association culture show on Saturday night, as tunes from both were featured in the event, which was also filled with MTV hits, traditional South Asian music, carefully choreographed dance pieces and slapstick comedy.
Called "Raaz" and held in a packed Salomon 101, the sold-out show closed with the highly anticipated senior and freshmen dances, both filled with talent and energy. The seniors danced both to South Asian music and hip-hop songs such as Flo Rida's "Low."
During the senior dance, the male dancers invigorated the audience by running through the aisles and jumping - from a trampoline - onto the stage.
The freshmen also mixed up their music, dancing first to a song by Indian singer Kishore Kumar and ending with a remix of Britney Spears' "Gimme More." Rajan Kothari '11 and Zeeshan Hussain '11 break danced, holding their bodies diagonal to the ground with only their arms and then jumping over one another.
Attitude Dance Company performed at the show to a mash-up of music accompanying Garba, a style of Indian dance, and other South Asian beats mixed with songs such as Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl." They also included Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat," performing their own modified Soulja Boy dance to the song.
The show began with a video starring the three emcees, Vivek Buch '08, Chintan Patel '08 and Ojus Doshi '08. The movie shows the trio turning on a TV and finding nothing good to watch. They then all agree that they want a SASA TV channel, and they pitch their idea to Brown TV. One of the emcees tells a scout at Brown TV that the new channel could have a good name: "Really Brown TV."
Parody videos were shown throughout the show, referring to popular television shows such as "The Office," "Friends" and "Next," the MTV dating show.
In SASA's parody of MTV's "Cribs," the video shows the home of one of the emcees, Chintan Patel '08, who welcomes viewers with a heavy Indian accent and tells them, "Take off your shoes first."
The video goes on to parody Indian families, as the emcee shows his plastic-wrapped couches, his wife cooking with Taco Bell hot sauce packets and his son crouching on the floor of the cupboard reading the newspaper, a setup the emcee calls an "eastern toilet."
Gaurab Chakrabarti '10 took the show in a different direction, adding stand-up comedy to the dance-heavy program. He joked about his parents, recalling a Halloween for which "my dad dressed me up as an engineer."
The audience laughed heartily when he joked about the difference between being South Asian and Asian.
"I was Asian enough for the kid sitting next to me to cheat off me, but not Asian enough for him to pass the test," he said.
Students also performed Raas, a folk-dance style from northern India. The style features heavy drum beats and uses sticks, or "dandiya," which the students twirled, banged together and hit against the floor while dancing.
The show also featured three musical performances. First, Herald Senior Staff Writer Nandini Jayakrishna '10 and Sakhi Saraf '09, accompanied by students on guitar, keyboard and "tabla," an Indian percussion instrument, sang in harmony to two pieces, one from a Bollywood movie and the other from Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The second was a soothing acoustic performance of a song from another Bollywood movie. The last was an instrumental piece featuring the guitar and the "tabla."
Ben Nicholson '11, who attended the show, said he was "really impressed" with Chakrabarti's act. "Usually when students do stand-up (comedy), they don't have the authority of being a professional comedian, so the audience decides beforehand they're not going to laugh," he said. But in Chakrabarti's case, he said, "the audience was receptive."
Salman Somjee, a sophomore at Columbia, said she enjoyed a piece by Lana Zaman '08, who commanded the stage during her solo performance of Odissi dance, a classical Indian dance form that involved dynamic moves and hand gestures.
"I really liked the Odissi," Somjee said. "It's a really cool form and people don't realize how difficult it was to do what she did."
Another attendant, Alex Morse '11, called the show "really great."
"You could tell they put a lot of hard work into it," he said.
