I am a dancer on Boston University’s premier Garba and Raas dance team, BU Fatakada, so I wanted to tell you all a little bit about it! To start, I would like to answer the question that many of you probably have right now, What is Garba and Raas? Garba and Raas is the traditional folk dance style of a certain state in India, this state is called Gujarat. These dance styles are popularly performed in Gujarat during the Hindu festival/holiday of Navratri and both are very high energy and fast paced dance styles where the dancers are dancing in a circle around a religious idol usually. Raas specifically, is done with sticks in the dancers hands and these sticks are called Dandiya. On the collegiate level, Garba and Raas has been taken to a whole new extent with faster choreography and extravagant themes! For our team, Fatakada, which means firework in the language of Gujarati which is spoken in Gujarat, (which is very fitting because our energetic and lively dancing which resembles the symbolism of a firework) our theme this year was based on the movie Home Alone for our competition season which means we included certain gimmicks and allusions to the movie with different dialogues and scenes into our set. After sending an audition video to a few competitions we got into three and attended two of them this year! One of our competitions was in Tampa Florida and the next one was at the University of Maryland in College Park! While we unfortunately did not take home any trophies this year, we had a whole lot of fun at our competitions where we met teams from all around the country and we sure will take home trophies in the years to come!