The blast that was the MSA Banquet
February 5, 2007by Tazeen Siddiqui
Celebrating Eid a full month after the fact, more than 200 party-goers attended the MSA Banquet for a night of good food, good people and good times.
The night got underway with an awe-inspiring welcome speech delivered by our fearless commander-in-chief, Shuaib Ally, followed up by a speech from Hamza Karamali. The talk on community involvement was interspersed with threats that dinner would be delayed by 2 hours. Panic struck the hearts of all in attendance, but mercifully, it did not actually go on for 2 hours, and ended with a delightful tale about orangutans (I kid you not) before we moved into the entertainment portion of the evening.
The first movie featured the cream of the MSA crop skillfully answering baffling questions, such as “What is the capital of Ontario?” and “What is your favourite tv show?” Dinner came next and was followed up with the highlight of the banquet: imported entertainment. Unable to rummage up our own homegrown talent, we cleverly decided to outsource and recruit Mac MSA members for the daunting task of keeping UofT MSA-ers thoroughly amused. The comedic stylings of Omair Rahman and Hamzah Moin (aka “Maniac Muslim”) left the masses in fits of laughter.
The second —and last— video featured a rousing rendition of “Yusuf”—a distorted twist on “Aicha”— by Foblandish and made it evident that UofT is in fact able to muster up some talent. The Oscar-esque thank you speech that followed unfortunately left out some names as applause slowly drowned out Foblandish…
Putting our own twist on the age-old Raffle, the Banquet organizer, Fadia Bahgat rhyming off ticket numbers from the top of her head for the prize-giveaway that capped off the evening. Oh, and T-shirt throwing.
Enjoy the visuals…
The banquet was a lot of fun except that it ended way later than I would have liked. I think in the future we should work on ending our events on time – which means starting them on time.