CMU Raasta, based at Carnegie Mellon University, was established in November 2011, by four freshmen who individually dreamed of starting a raas team before attending CMU. They all met during orientation week and decided to make it happen. After countless meetings with other student organizations, these freshmen finally created a very unique and talented team.
Amita Batra, a student at UT Austin, is studying to become a mechanical engineer. She chose this major because she finds it interesting and allows her to continuously think outside of the box to solve problems. She also loves the fact that she is following in her father’s footsteps and can relate to his inspiring journey. This summer, she is currently interning for Chevron, in the downtown Houston office, and is working on a short film with her best friend. A few things to know about Amita is that she enjoys jamming out to music in her car, she sometimes pretends to be a superstar singer, and really likes cooking and plating dishes to look like pieces of art.
Dear members and supporters of Desi Dance Network,
I've received a lot of feedback, messages, questions about having Desi Dance Network head a Bollywood Fusion finals competition. In response to these inquiries, I, along with our Board of Directors have reached out to dancers/teams, judges, and competition organizers to gauge the necessity for a new Bollywood Fusion championship and what it would entail.</p>
This past season, the most prestigious Bollywood-Fusion Competition, Bollywood America, was held in Cleveland, Ohio. Every year, teams from across the nation battle it out onstage to win the title of National Champions. Northwestern University Anubhav proved that their combination of hard-work and talent was lethal and became this year’s victors. Anubhav was established in 2008, by a couple members of Northwestern's Raas team and a graduate student who was a former member of Stanford Dil Se. These dancers had attended Best of the Best, in Chicago, the year before, saw a few of the HFD teams competing, and were inspired to create a new team at Northwestern.
Anand Lakshminarayan, alumnus of UC Berkeley, graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He chose this major because growing up he had a passion for video games, which naturally translated into interests in the computer science field. He strongly believes that nowadays software enables us to change every facet of society from education, transportation, communication, and obviously gaming so he really wanted to study it in college. He currently works as a Program Manager at Microsoft.
