A projection screen flashed a picture of a well-known Bollywood actor. His face had been transformed, with the help of Photoshop, into a disproportional swirl of facial features. Audience members snickered among themselves.
"That's so easy," they said. "He's like the Tom Cruise of Bollywood."
But Fahad Shamsi, member of a four-person team named "WTF" and public relations officer for the Pakistani Students Association, couldn't figure out what the audience already seemed to know. So he guessed.
Shamsi's team didn't make it to the final round. But when he joined his friends in the audience at the end of the round, he just shrugged.
"It's a fun thing," he said. "And it promotes a certain sense of the culture."
Shamsi, an economics junior, participated in a formalized version of an Indian and Pakistani tradition known as Antakshari.
"The feel of it, and how people really get into it, reminds me so much of home," said Arundathi Amirapu, Indian Cultural Association secretary and engineering sophomore. "And you don't have to sing very well at all."
Usually, the game is played at home among family members, and is primarily a singing challenge. One group starts the game with a song, and the next team's song begins with the syllable that ended the first song.
Since Bollywood, the Indian equivalent of Hollywood, began its own Antakshari TV show 20 years ago, the game's popularity has increased, and its challenges have grown more complicated, said Amirapu. Saturday night's contest, designed by Shweta Mahajan and Nishant Porbanderwalla, began with the traditional singing challenge, but then moved on to movie trivia and celebrity identification.
Described by Amirapu as the ICA's two "Bollywood freaks," Porbanderwalla and Mahajan said they knew most of the trivia they came up with off the top of their heads but double checked their information on the Internet. Mahajan said it took them 10 to 15 hours to come up with the game's questions.
"They reflect everything that's going on in society," said Mahajan, ICA public relations officer and marketing sophomore. "We expect people in the audience who don't know much about them to come here and get educated."
Many ICA and PSA activities are geared toward educating students who don't know much about Indian or Pakistani traditions. Antakshari plays an important part in reaching that goal because movies and music make up a huge part of the culture, Amirapu said.
Pakistan currently bans Bollywood movies because of political problems between India and Pakistan. But everyone in Pakistan watches them anyway, said Porbanderwalla, host of the event and economics senior.
There is currently a huge crossover between Indian and Pakistani films, Mahajan said. But the connection between the two countries goes beyond just songs and movies.
"We speak the same language," said Amin Khoja, accounting senior and vice president of PSA. "It's just written differently."
Shamsi said Antakshari is proof of the bonds between the groups.
"It's very friendly. There's no tension whatsoever," Shamsi said. "We're a very close-knit community."
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