SASH kicks off fall semester with Class Bash

On Saturday, the South Asian Students at Hopkins (SASH) hosted their first major event of the fall semester, the SASH Class Bash. The event consisted of small competitions to promote competition between the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior classes.

“This is our first big event of the semester.” SASH Vice President Saranga Arora said. “Our goal is to unite the classes with competition. It shows freshmen how to get to know the upperclassmen.”

“It is a happy, fun day where classes will fight it out with each other to see who’s the best,” Freshman Representative Anwesha Dubey said.

Festive music was blasting at the event. There was also plenty of food dishes and drinks atop the picnic tables. All the food was prepared specifically for this event.

The members prepared a plethora of cultural dishes, including pani puri, which was set aside specifically for the Class Bash’s famous “Pani Puri-Eating Contest.”

“Pani puri is a shell that you put water in. We don’t get to eat that type of stuff while we are here,” Arora said, explaining the snack, which is popular in several parts of Southeast Asia.

Many of the members couldn’t wait and dug into the dishes within minutes.

For this event, each class was assigned a color — freshmen wore red, sophomores green, juniors blue and seniors black. SASH organized various competitions including dodgeball, three-legged races, egg-on-a-spoon races, tug-of-war and the pani puri-eating contest.

The bash began with members tossing a nerf football around.

“SASH basically wants to promote and extend Indian culture throughout Hopkins,” Dubey said.

“[We are] the South Asian group. We tried to bring together the Indian culture at Hopkins,” Arora said. “Whether it is through food, dance or events. we are basically the overarching group that helps all of the other cultural groups with their events.”

A little later on, the group began warming up for the main competition by throwing a Frisbee around.

“We have a bowling trip soon and a Bali Festival,” Dubey said. “We try to do many different things to inform people about the culture. It’s amazing because it is different within all of the different countries.”

SASH puts together many different events to showcase the specific cultures that they represent and want to show to the Hopkins community.

Each class put up a great fight throughout the day’s activities, but in the end, the junior class prevailed. They were named the SASH Class Bash 2014 Champions. The freshmen class followed in a close second place, sophomores trailed in third place and the seniors claimed fourth place.

“SASH Class Bash is one of my favorite events because it’s a fantastic opportunity for students from each of the classes to get to know each other and bond through the spirit of competition,” SASH President Rohit Iyer said. “I was glad to see that despite impending midterms, we had a great turnout, especially from the freshmen, and everyone had a great time!”

Iyer was extremely pleased with the way the event fared and with how hard his fellow SASH members worked to pull this, along with many other events, off so smoothly.

“This is my first year as SASH president, and though it’s a lot of responsibility, this year’s SASH board members have all been exceptional, especially our Vice President Saranga,” Iyer said. “I’m really grateful for their support. We’ve had a good start to this semester, and we have a lot more great events planned for the rest of the year.”

Iyer was especially proud of the SASH Class Bash planning committee for putting together what he considered a fun and well-executed event.

“Also, special thanks to our SASH Class Bash planning committee for doing such a phenomenal job planning this event.” Iyer said.