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Pehchaan, SASA work together

Though the South Asian Students Association (SASA) includes Pakistan as one of the countries whose culture it promotes on campus, Pakistani international students created another group, Pehchaan, in winter 2006 to address Pakistani cultural and political issues.

“We felt there was a need to try and organize events and discussions that were focused more so on Pakistan to some extent,” Babur Khwaja ’09, one of Pehchaan’s officers, said in an interview.

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“South Asia is big ... and while clumping all its people together is convenient, it’s not always efficient, or even fair,” Faaez Ul Haq ’11, a member of Pehchaan, said in an e-mail.Ul Haq is also a staff photographer for The Daily Princetonian.

Khwaja noted, fundamentally, that the groups have different focuses.

“One of the big motivators for Pehchaan’s founders was that there’s a huge scope of political problems in Pakistan that are so pressing and at the forefront of the news,” he said.

“Pehchaan aims to ... provide opportunities for Princeton students, Pakistani and non-Pakistani to come to appreciate different nuances of Pakistani culture,” Ul Haq said.

The Pakistani group welcomes all students, including Americans and international students with no ethnic ties to Pakistan as well as Indian students, Khwaja explained in an e-mail.

Though some of Pakistan’s political issues involve India, its neighbor, Khwaja said the “history of fighting [between the two] doesn’t really factor into the way SASA and Pehchaan work together at Princeton.”

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“We support each other,” he added.

Deepika Govind ’10, co-president of SASA, said that though the two groups have co-hosted events in the past, the Mumbai attacks in late November brought the two groups even closer. SASA and Pehchaan issued a joint statement following the attacks.

Pehchaan also aims to address the difficulties faced by Pakistani students upon arrival at the University.

“Around seven to 10 students come from Pakistan to Princeton each year, and they have a pretty tough transition,” Khwaja said. “One of our big roles is to make those people feel comfortable and to give them a sense of community.”

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At the time of Pehchaan’s founding, “there wasn’t much of an international student community in SASA. Most of SASA are first-generation Americans of South Asian descent,” Khwaja said.

Govind confirmed that SASA comprises “probably mostly Indian students” who are “kids born [in the United States to] Indian parents,” but added that “we do have a lot of international students [including some] from Tanzania or Mauritius or England.”

“We define ourselves as the South Asian Students Association because we encompass lots of people who define themselves as South Asians but who are not even necessarily from those countries,” Govind added.

Though many try to categorize the group as specifically geared toward issues relating to India, “we are not the Indian students asssociation,” Govind said.

Both groups’ members stressed that there are no personal tensions between the broader South Asian and the more specific Pakistani student organizations.

“SASA’s a very good group and it’s not as if we [Pakistani students] felt excluded or that we wanted to splinter off,” Khwaja said.

SASA and Pehchaan have collaborated on events relating to South Asian issues on campus, including a fundraiser for the Bihar flood victims and co-hosting the Diwali-Eid banquet every October.

“[The new coordinators of Hindu and Muslim life] have really driven our two groups along with [Princeton Hindu Satsangam] and [the Muslim Students Association] to work together more often,” Govind said in an e-mail.

Ul Haq noted that one of Pehchaan’s upcoming events will be the Basant festival, “which will be a celebration of Spring’s arrival ala the celebration in much of South Asia.”

“There will be food, a mela, music and a kite-flying festival,” Ul Haq added.