Hooray for Bollywood

A huge thank you to The Just Bollywood team at Imperial College London Indian Society. This year, their annual inter-university dance competition on 4 December saw 10 universities battle it out at Queen Mary’s People’s Palace, displaying an amazing range of talent and raising over £5,000 to support our projects. As well as raising funds, the event gave us a unique opportunity to directly engage with the Indian diaspora in the UK and established and emerging talent in the dance world.

Our Snehalaya UK trustees Harshna Karsan and Phil Hudson were able to attend the unforgettable evening sharing information on our projects to the audience and having the honour of announcing the winners. Congratulations to the top three dance groups:

1st place - University College London 2nd place - University Of Nottingham 3rd place - University Of Leeds All teams completed a three-week fundraising challenge to support our work and raised an amazing amount of money together! Congratulations to UCL and Southampton for being the top two teams and absolutely smashing their target of £1,000.

Our children were also able to take part, submitting their own dance videos as part of the Mini-round competition which they loved taking part in and proved popular with the competitors!

Host for the night was DJ Shraii, holder of “Best UK Asian DJ” for 2021, BBC Asian Network Radio presenter and also the Official Tour DJ for Arjun Artist. It truly was a spectacular with judges including Praz, Founder and Choreographer of London School of Bollywood (LSB), dedicated to developing the next generation of Bollywood dancers, Leena, one of the UK’s most in demand Bollywood Dance Choreographers having choreographed and performed with Shahid Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha and WILL.I.AM! Other judges were Aakash Phulwani, Cofounder of AfroDesi and Dr Veena Babu, a full time GP and the UK's leading Bollywood YouTuber and influencer; her YouTube Channel I:V dance has 240K +Subscribers and over 50 million views. We were absolutely thrilled to have been able to take part in such a dazzling, energetic and fun event and are extremely grateful to the organisers and dancers for choosing Snehalaya to support in such an entertaining and unique way.