at the South Asian Youth Initiative by Fatima A. '25

This weekend, some people from MIT SAAS went to Yale for the South Asian Youth Initiative conference. The purpose of this conference is to create community for South Asians and provide a space to talk about activism, dialogue and solidarity. Throughout the weekend, I tried to keep track of everything that was happening and I will try to recreate most of that here!

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Friday 2/10/23 

1:45 pm – Bhuvna M. ’23, Neil M. ’25, Sarah S. ’24 and I meet in front of McCormick to head to South Station to catch our bus to New Haven. It is very sunny and warm; naturally, everyone is in a very good mood. 

 

2:15 pm – At South Station, we are looking around to figure out what station our flixbus leaves from. Realizing our confusion, someone walking by tells us the gate number and asks if we are going to Yale. It is one of the people from Harvard who are also going to SAYI. We walk over to the gate and are already excited at the prospect of meeting all the desi people we will at this conference. 

 

2:30 pm – The bus leaves from South Station. We find an empty row and take the four seats. For a while, we talk about different things: classes, extracurriculars, how excited we are for the weekend. We also meet someone from Wellesley here.

At some point, Neil and I both fall asleep. Sarah and Bhuvna are still talking. I wake up with the worst neck ache ever but it eventually goes away. 

 

5:25 pm – Welcome to New Haven! It is more windy and cold than the sunny, deceptively warm Boston day we left behind. We part from the rest of the people and call an Uber to get to our Airbnb.

The Airbnb is really beautiful. It is a cute 2 storey house with 4 bedrooms and a small lounge area and kitchen. We excitedly go around the entire place and express great excitement over the light in the bathroom mirror.

 

6:13 pm – We walk to St. Thomas More Chapel to get ourselves registered. The excitement has not worn out. New Haven is a beautiful college town and we are all for it. Neil points at signs that fascinate him as we look around to find places to eat dinner.

6:26 pm – We register and get Shan Masala merch (arguably the most important part of the weekend). They are one of the sponsors so they have goody bags with some of their masalas and custard! 

At the same time, after failing to reserve at the Indian restaurant nearby, we decide to go to a Thai place. 

 

6:45 pm – We are waiting for our food in Basil Restaurant. I ordered the Indonesian Mee Goreng noodles and a peach boba. 

The place is really good. The food and portions are great and the person helping us is extremely nice. The peach boba is almost like a slush. It’s different but I love it. 

We decide to go to the Barnes & Noble we saw on our way. We look around for a while, Sarah and Bhuvna get Yale merch and we head back to the Airbnb.

 

8:20 pm –

After getting to the Airbnb, we all work until 9:30 and then I start ironing my clothes for the Banquet tomorrow with Sarah’s cute little iron. It is really small so it takes me a long time to get them in a reasonable shape. Sarah teaches Bhuvna some dance moves as Neil works on his 6.031⁠01 6.102: Software Construction readings.

Around the same time, we put on a movie on the TV. The movie is not great but the commentary is, so we are all having fun! 

 

10:37 pm –  We order Taco Bell and boba from T-swirl Crepe. Some insightful commentary along the way from Bhuvna and Sarah: 

‘Men are temporary. Money is for life.’

‘I hate Asha.⁠02 the main character Why does she have to suck?’

 

11:52 pm – We’re watching Indian Matchmaking. One of the people invited to the conference is Sima Taparia from this show and since I have not watched it before, I must catch up before I meet her. We put up an episode from the second season and immerse ourselves in this incredible piece of media.

 

12:30 am – Everyone gets ready to go to bed.

 

1:28 am – So much has happened in the past couple of days that even though I am tired and desperately want to go to bed, my brain is a jumble of thoughts. It feels like a stereo is playing; on one channel, I can hear ‘Hey yo, Westerburg’; on others, I am thinking about literature and the books I need to get for my class, general existential thoughts, my 8.04⁠03 Quantum Physics I problem set and drafting this blog post. At one point, I become aware that I’ll write this in the blog and then start thinking about the different ways people imagine and how it is visual for some people and not for others. At this point, I am scared I’ll forget all of this in the morning so I pull out my phone.

I check my discord and for some reason, Matthew H. ’25 thinks it’s okay to send me math at 1 am. Inconceivable.⁠04 Yes, that is a Princess Bride reference. What can I say, I'm a sucker for happy endings. Yes, that is a Heathers reference.

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Saturday 2/11/23 

8:16 am – I wake up and start to get ready for our panels in the morning. 

 

9:26 am – We leave for breakfast. Ananya G. ’23, Deekshita K. ’22 and Mitali C. ’24 just got here so we are trying to find them before we leave. They miss the street and we can’t figure out the lockbox so after a little bit of confusion, Neil just sprints down the street to find them. The rest of us choose food over Neil and leave for breakfast. He lets them into the Airbnb and catches up with us. 

9:50 am – After walking around the entire building trying to find the correct entrance to the Science Building, we find that the closest entrance to us was actually the correct one. We get bagels for breakfast, which was a good throwback to when I was here during the fall for quizbowl and had the exact same bagels. We head in for the Opening Keynote with Sal Khan, who is expected to join virtually. As the moderator introduces him and says that he went to MIT, we all cheer and everyone is looking at us. It is pretty funny. 

Here, we also meet Maisha P., who graduated from MIT in 2021 and is now at Yale for graduate school!

Sal Khan has some emergency so he is unable to make it and we start heading out to our first panels. 

 

11:44 am – I am at the first panel for Mental Health and Queer Identity with Neil, Deekshita, Ananya and Mitali. The panelists are all very cool and doing great work in their respective fields. 

We talked about how intergenerational trauma, immigrant and refugee experiences and language barrier are key reasons for the stigma surrounding mental health in South Asian communities. The fact that there are no clinical words for depression in Urdu and Hindi is frankly, very scary. People fail to communicate what they are really struggling with because they don’t know how to accurately translate their feelings in a way where the medical professionals, who have not been trained or seen similar struggles, understand them effectively.

First gen people often struggle with cultural conflict. Inside your home, you are ‘very desi’ and ‘very white’ outside which means you are essentially living two lives. This can be very confusing for people who are trying to understand their identity. 

There was conversation on how a lot of South Asian communities had, although not perfect, a more open understanding of sexual orientation and gender, which were taken away during the British colonialism era and the Victorian ideals of what gender and sexuality need to look like. 

 

12:53 pm – Mitali and I walk over to Costa Pizza to meet Sarah, Bhuvna and Shreya R. ’24 (who just got here) for lunch. We talk about our thoughts on the panel and have a great conversation as we get there.

We talk about our respective panels and have a quick lunch before heading out to Battell Chapel for ‘Up Close with Sima Taparia.’ There is a moderator asking panel questions from her and also asking some audience questions that they had collected beforehand through a Google form. 

 

2:10 pm – We meet some people from Brown and hang out with them for a little while before heading for our next sessions. Bhuvna, Sarah and I head to Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall for the Arts and Entertainment panel. At one point, Sima Aunti walks down and Bhuvna just yells “HellOOO” and we all cheer again.

All the panelists are really talented. The creative director and co-founder of Rastah,⁠05 Rastah is a Pakistani urbanwear brand that aims to authentically represent South Asian stories through fashion and support and uplift the artisans who are involved in the process a Broadway actress,⁠06 Shoba was Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, Eliza Hamilton in Hamilton and Nessarose in WICKED a writer,⁠07 Annika Sharma, writer of Love, Chai and other four letter words an actor,⁠08 Anirudh Pisharodhy, Des from Never Have I Ever Season 3 and the co-founder of Product of Culture⁠09 POC is an initiative that amplifies brown artists and initiatives were there. They talked about their respective journeys and struggles in art and entertainment. After the panel, we got pictures with Anirudh Pisharodhy and then headed back to get ready for the banquet. 

5:59 pm – It takes us about an hour to get ready and we head to Omni Hotel for the banquet. After one of the organizers speaks for a little bit, there is a fashion show. While the rest of the people are sitting down, all of us MIT folks are standing and dancing and cheering loudly. After the fashion show, Gurbir Grewal and Archana Jain gave keynote speeches and later dinner was served. 

 

8:00 pm – After dinner, people start dancing to the music playing. At first, we are just dancing at our table but later form a circle near the cluster of other people dancing. We keep planning on leaving but every new song breaks our resolve. 

 

8:51 pm – After we get back, people share their thoughts on some of the panels during the day. We watch a movie review for some really bad movie and leave for Chai after Dark. 

 

10:37 pm – To our extreme disappointment, there is no chai at Chai after Dark. We debate leaving to get coffee, then come back and after a lot of indecisiveness, we decide to stay. We watch the performances put up by Yale’s Bhangra team and individual performances and leave.

 

11:30 pm – Deekshita, being the queen she is, offers to put henna and I look through designs. She and Ananya brought a lot of nail polishes and other nail art supplies, so people are just hanging around, talking and doing nail art. During this time, there are a lot of good conversations and interesting stories going around. We are here for a while.

4:00 am – A bunch of people leave to go to bed but six of us are still here. We play hot seat, which essentially meant going around asking people questions for 2 minutes. except there was an actual hot seat. except not really. it’s a cushion on the floor. 

 

5:00 am – We have finally retired for the day.

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Sunday 2/12/23

9:20 am – Given how early (yep) we went to bed, I woke up around 9:20 and others are also waking up and getting ready around this time. We check out of our Airbnb and walk over to a Tropical Smoothie Cafe nearby for breakfast.

 

10:44 am – We eat breakfast with all of our stuff just in the cafe. I got a Sunrise Sunset smoothie and a quesadilla. The only notable thing here is that they were playing Lavender Haze and then Anti Hero (no, I’m not obsessed with Taylor Swift). After breakfast, we split up to go to our panels on Caste, Colorism and Gender Violence, and Supremacy Politics. 

 

12:30 pm – I had planned to have lunch with Zayyan N. ’25, one of my friends from Pakistan who goes to Yale so we meet up after the panel. I wanted to try their dining halls so we go to one for lunch. We catch up on classes, extracurriculars and general semester things. He is taking a bunch of computer science classes and Chinese and is also ULAing⁠10 which I assume means Undergraduate Lab Assistant for an introductory programming course taught in Racket.⁠11 a programming language I was not aware of  

After lunch, we walk around campus. Like the last time I was here, the big library that kills you if there is a fire Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is closed over the weekend but Zayyan points out the architecture, which involves large ‘windows’ of translucent marble and granite to control the temperature inside the library by reflecting and absorbing suitable amounts of sunlight.

We walk around to the Wellness Center on campus. It has a lot of technology-free areas, study spots where people are working, spaces to nap but most importantly, as a sign points out, ‘Hydration Stations,’ which, to me, is a really funny way to describe water fountains. We walk over to Silliman, the dorm that he lives in, and wander around the basement, where the game room and buttery⁠12 dorms at Yale have late night eateries run by students are. We check out the Acorn Cafe on the top floor. It seems pretty full, there are people making smoothies, people working and as Zayyan shows me, there is a sandbox in one of the rooms. Incredible.

 

2 pm – I walk back to meet up with the rest of SAAS again. Unfortunately, my phone dies on the way and I am so smart, I walk right past the building I was supposed to go to but thankfully, there is a kind Yale student who helps me find it. People ordered food and are eating lunch in one of the rooms. We are to leave for Union Station in about an hour. 

 

3:28 pm – We are at Union Station. We run into the Harvard people again! 

3:54 pm – We are on the train back. The group got slightly separated but I am sitting close enough to Sarah, Neil and Mitali that we can occasionally talk. I start working on this blogpost and send the document where I am drafting this into our group chat.

 

4:34 pm – After asking Sarah, Neil asks me, ‘Who’s Candace?’ very cool.

 

6:18 pm – We have arrived at South Station. We take the Red Line back to campus and guess who we see on the train. The Harvard people again! meant to be 🤩

 

~7 pm – I am back at Next House!

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My goals for the conference were to find a place to begin to think about identity, spend the weekend with a lot of desi people and get to know people on SAAS board with me better and I think I got all of that! There were a lot of diverse desi people, I got to spend a lot of time with all the cool SAAS board people (my queens (gender neutral)) and found a lot of conversations, at the very least, thought provoking. 

There is a lot to do, a lot to think about and a lot to decide but seeing all the successful panelists living happy, fulfilling lives managing their different identities in a beautiful way, convinced me that I could be happy too. There is a future where I could be thriving in my community, where I am accepted for whoever I choose to be and where I don’t need to convince anyone of the authenticity of my identities.