Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's 'Best of the Best' is basically every desi girl's college fantasy

There is a certain version of college that many of us have grown up watching on screen. You arrive at a new campus, find your people, discover something you are good at, have a crush, make questionable decisions with your friends, and somehow end up with a life that feels completely different from the one you had at home. Netflix’s Best of the Best takes that formula and puts two childhood best friends, Maya and Anjali, into a UCLA Bollywood-fusion dance team. They have practices, competitions, friendships, crushes, and enough drama to make college look like one long event.

The funny part is that the dance team might be the most relatable bit for desi viewers. If you have grown up around school annual days, college fests, sangeets, or family functions, you probably know at least one person who treats a dance performance like the Olympics.

In the film, Maya, played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, and Anjali, played by Priyanka Kedia, take that energy to college, where the stakes are much higher, and the team is working towards a US championship. The story is inspired by the real South Asian collegiate dance circuit, which co-writer Prashanth Venkataramanujam and Hasan Minhaj experienced themselves.

The fantasy of finding your people

A big part of the college fantasy is finding a group that becomes your life outside lectures. Best of the Best takes that idea and puts it inside a dance team. You have people you practise with, travel with, eat with, and probably spend way too much time with. The dance team becomes its own little world, which is something many college students can relate to, whether their version was a sports team, theatre group, college publication, or just the group that somehow ended up together every day.

For Maya and Anjali, college also changes their friendship. They have grown up together and arrive at UCLA as best friends, but they are also becoming adults and figuring out what they want for themselves. That is where the movie's college setting becomes more interesting. Your first year can be the first time you realise that being best friends with someone does not mean you have to want the same things as them.

And then there is the very desi part of it all. The dance team is doing Bollywood fusion, bringing together Bollywood, South Indian dance, classical styles, and hip-hop. So while it is a college activity, it is also tied to the way many young South Asians use dance to stay connected to their culture and find community.

Everyone wants their college movie moment

There is also something fun about how Best of the Best treats college as a place where you can reinvent yourself. Maya sees herself as a dancer and goes for the audition even though Ramakrishnan, who plays her, had no previous dance experience. That is probably part of the fantasy. You show up somewhere new, try something you have never done before, find a group of people who get you, and suddenly discover a side of yourself you did not know was there.

Of course, real college is rarely this neat. There are assignments, bad roommates, awkward introductions, and wondering if you picked the right course. Most people are not spending their evenings preparing for a national dance championship either. But Best of the Best taps into the version of college we like imagining: the one where your best friend is beside you, your friends have a plan for Friday night, and you somehow end up dancing in the middle of it all.

Lead image: Netflix

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