Bostonian Vinay Rajur, who has been a member of the Cornell Bhangra team for the past three years, is campaigning hard for his team to participate in the America Got Talent competition. Cornell Bhangra team was recently featured on Today show and has been chosen as finalists for the top 50 spots to get onto the America’s Got Talent live round.
The team is looking for votes via this link: today.com/agt. If you want to support the team, you can click “Log in to vote” and then click “Sign in with Facebook” to vote for Cornell Bhangra. The team has been working hard to share this unique dance form on national platform and has come a long way.
Rajur said that Cornell Bhangra has been a strong presence in the competitive North American Bhangra circuit. “Over the past few years Cornell Bhangra has had a particularly successful record placing at a large percentage of the competitions we performed at, and most notably being crowned as the World’s Best Bhangra Crew for the past two years running,” said Rajur.
Cornell Bhangra is a competitive dance team formed as a club by Cornell University students back in 1997, to showcase and spread love and appreciation for this dance form. Bhangra itself is a folk dance that originated in the northern Indian region of Punjab and is used as a celebratory expression of happiness and life to welcome the arrival of spring.
Cornell Bhangra has been one of the earliest teams to participate in the North American bhangra circuit and through over 17 years of competing, Cornell Bhangra has established itself as a well-known team across the continent, Rajur said.
“Even on Cornell’s campus, the team has made a name for itself by hosting its annual Bhangra showcase, Pao Bhangra, which attracts annually over 2,500 students, faculty and residents from the surrounding areas, and is even featured as #56 on Cornell’s notable list of 161 Things to Do while at Cornell,” Rajur said.
He added that due to the nature of this team’s existence as a college club team, individual members change from year to year, but past team captains include Kartik Shastri (2010-2013), Anik Saha (2013-2014) and Taisu Kumar and Armaan Kapoor current co-captains for the 2014-2015 season.
“I have been a member of Cornell Bhangra for the past three years, joining my sophomore year. All members attend tryouts at the start of the fall semester where as many 200 students show up each year,” Rajur said. “I decided to try out after attending Pao Bhangra the year before and was lucky enough to make it through callbacks and eventually onto the team. I have been a competitive dancer on the team for the past year and a half.”
Rajur grew up in Massachusetts in several of the suburbs of Boston. He spent the majority of my childhood in the town of Andover where he attended Sanborn Elementary School, The Pike School for Middle School and The Pingree School in South Hamilton, MA, for High School. He graduated from high school in the spring of 2010 and matriculated into Cornell’s College of Engineering that fall, where he recently graduated this past May with a BS in Engineering Physics and a Minor in Business.