I had been looking forward to Boston’s first annual South Asian Showdown for about two months, and I have to say, it was totally worth the wait! My friend Nitya, who is in charge of the Bollywood movie-watching group I’m in, invited a few of us to the SAS, a competition that brought teams of dancers from all over the country to Boston for prize money and bragging rights. I thought it was a Bollywood dancing competition, but it was actually an Indian dancing competition with four different categories, only one of which was Bollywood; the others were Bhangra, Fusion, and Garba/Raas. Not to sound culturally ignorant, but they all looked good to me! There were definitely different styles, but I was glad I wasn’t a judge — the teams were all so well-practiced and had come from so far away that I would have wanted to let everyone win.
We paid twice as much for VIP tickets even though nobody really knew what that meant, but it turned out that VIP means front row! We were right there with the directors of the show and were pretty much dancing in our seats the whole four hours because it felt like we were right in the middle of things. The dancers were going so crazy with enthusiasm that sometimes little pieces of their costumes would fly off right into our laps. We thought about keeping them as souvenirs, but tassel balls on armbands have a rightful home on the arm of a dancer, not hanging off my closet doorknob.
I forgot to take my ticket with me when I went out to the lobby during intermission to chow down on some festively plump samosas, and they almost didn’t let me back in — I thought I was going to miss the second half of the show and all the winners! Luckily, the guy who asked me for my ticket was the same guy who took me to my seat the first time, and through my law-school-developed powers of recall memory, I was able to recount the whole conversation I had with him two hours earlier when we were walking down the aisle, and then he remembered me! Thank you, Socratic method, for priming my brain to remember things and regurgitate them on command.
Going to Boston always marks a night of real motivation for me, since there’s so much going on in Cambridge (and because I live right in the middle of Harvard Square, so you can get to about anything you want in a few minutes’ walk) that I rarely feel the need to go “all the way” to Boston, which is pathetic because Boston is ten minutes and two dollars away. Every time I go to something outside the Harvard bubble I have a great time, so I’m going to resolve to do it more often. Jai ho!
– Erin
