Khare Family Adventures

Bollywood is the largest film industry in the world, producing the most films with the largest audiences. It makes up to 800 films a year – twice as many as Hollywood and about 14 million Indian people go to the cinema each day!

Last Saturday night, we went to see Ayushee perform at the Bollywood dance contest sponsored by UCLA but with all the major colleges in the Pacific competing. This included USC, Berkeley, Stanford, UC Irvine, UCSD and USF to name a few.

All in all, I was impressed by the creativeness of the students in coming up with the story line, costumes, music and set design. A pretty complete presentation.

The winner was UC Berkeley with UCSD coming in a close second.

Here is a cut from Ayushee’s performance.

Note to Ayushee:  It was a tremendous effort and clearly a lot of hard work went into the preparation and practice. On the funny side, I thought the American Idol spoof at the beginning was pretty good.

As a novice observer, I have several recommendations for next year’s contest.

First, it was clear to me that the winning teams had some big time support for costume design, set design and construction and choreography. As a USC student, you should leverage the outstanding talents of the USC School of Cinematic Arts which is one of the leading (if not the top – behind UCLA) schools in the country for film. Seek out a prof and some film students to help you.

Second, your costumes need to “pop”. The winners all had brightly colored costumes with sequins and sparkle. Costumes cost money, so see if you can get some rich USC alums to help sponsor you. Let them know you lost to UCLA and you should have money flowing in!

Finally, get some more students to participate. The winners had big numbers and that helped make a grander impression on the large stage. Eighteen to twenty dancers seemed to be the magic number.  But get quality over quantity (no bellies hanging out – you know what I’m talking about)!

Congratulations on a job well done. Anjali and I had a great time watching all of the dance productions. We’re coming again next year!