Zoom University: First years find friendships and family through South Asian dance teams

By: Sara Raja

This article was written as part of a collaboration between Monsoon and AKDxDRD.

UNC Chapel Hill’s class of 2024 did not expect to start their college experience during a global pandemic. 

Transitioning from high school to college is difficult under normal circumstances, but the added layer of COVID-19 has made it even harder to form friendships and build community. 

First-year Pallavi Maladkar spent her first semester at home in Waxhaw, North Carolina. She said attending classes online was emotionally draining.

“All of the work of college was there and none of the fun part of college was there,” Maladkar said. “It was just like every day felt the same, like you wake up, go to your classes, do your work until you have to eat dinner and go to bed.”

To make friends, she said she attended different online club meetings that interested her and tried to reach out to people in her classes. 

Anjali Keyal, a first year from Cary, North Carolina, found herself in a similar situation. She also spent her first semester at home, trying to find friends through clubs and FaceTiming with her intended suitemates. One of the clubs Keyal joined was Bhangra Elite. 

UNC is home to a large community of South Asian dancers — Bhangra Elite is just one of four South Asian dance teams at the university. 

Every year, Sangam, UNC's South Asian awareness organization, holds an intercollegiate dance competition called Aaj Ka Dhamaka (AKD), which draws teams from across the country.

In 2019, AKDxDRD board member and UNC senior Zara Mehta developed an initiative called “Aaj Ki Dosti” (Hindi for “today’s friendship”) as a way to encourage mutual respect and support between teams at the AKDxDRD competition. 

But when in-person competitions were put on hold, Mehta said the initiative was refocused to instead foster community for first-years involved in South Asian dance at UNC. 

“A lot of us, when we came into college, found Aaj Ka Dhamaka or we found dance teams where we got that community and support,” Mehta said. “We wanted to focus on how first-years are coping with that transition to college, and how relationships and friendships on dance teams have supported people in this time of Covid.”

Keyal has loved dancing since she was young and had been doing Bhangra for a couple years prior to coming to UNC, so auditioning for Bhangra Elite was a no-brainer, she said. 

She made the team and began attending Zoom practices twice a week, where she got to know her teammates.

“It’s been one of the highlights of my first year because it’s given me a group of friends and a group of people who all share the same interests as I do,” Keyal said. “I think without joining BE I would have been pretty lonely and I wouldn’t have had a good way to express myself physically and artistically.”

Besides dancing together twice a week, Bhangra Elite also holds Zoom game nights, she said. 

Junior Aayush Purohit is one of the co-captains of Bhangra Elite. He joined the team as a first-year, and said it was a huge factor in forming his friend groups. 

“I think it would have been really tough if I didn’t have that community,” he said. “It kind of just became like a family. The people I met, my team members, they became people I saw two or three times a week, so because of that we got to know each other really, really well.”

Becoming captain of the team was something Purohit had always wanted to do, but he never imagined doing it during a pandemic, he said.

He said the team took the challenge in stride and found ways to make practices work.

“We fell into a rhythm of how we wanted to do things, me and the other two captains, and I feel like the entire team was able to improve really, really well,” he said.

Helping the first-years on the team find a community was something he and the other co-captains wanted to focus on, Purohit said. 

“We really wanted to give them the community that we felt we had when we ourselves were first-years,” he said.

He said holding game nights and watching videos of Bhangra performances together was a way to interact with the first-years.

“We wanted to make sure they at least had this community, this team as a group that they could depend on and go to,” he said.

AKDxDRD recently held a game night inspired by the Aaj Ki Dosti initiative. It was open to students involved in South Asian dance and anyone else who wanted a chance to relax and make new friends, Mehta said.

“The game night was really emblematic of what we’re trying to do this year with Aaj Ki Dosti,” she said. “Just to have a space where we’re developing friendships, and especially focus on people who may not already have that established support team, which for us was first-years.”

Maladkar, who like Keyal joined a South Asian dance team, UNC Chalkaa, said her team also has regular practices and social events like game nights.

She said joining the team has had a positive impact on her mental health.

“It gives me something to look forward to and something to do that isn’t schoolwork and writing,” Maladkar said.

Her advice to first-years who are trying to find a community is to join many clubs and see what sticks.

“Just go to Heel Life and sign up for a bunch of clubs and at least go to their first couple meetings to see what they’re about,” she said. “Once you get that first glimpse, you’ll know what you like and what you don’t like, and then you’ll be able to form more of a community through there.”

Sara Raja is a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill. She writes for The Daily Tar Heel and serves as Associate Features Editor for Coulture Magazine.