Paranda Party is a queer South Asian cultural celebration built around the paranda, a hand-braided hair tassel worn throughout Punjabi tradition. Since 2024, we've turned this piece of tradition into a whole inclusive party: a space where South Asian identity and queerness don't have to be negotiated, just celebrated, together.

This November, Paranda Party returns with Jeeti Raho. The name comes from the blessings our elders give us: jeeti raho, khush raho, abad raho. Stay living, stay happy, stay prosperous. Many of us grew up hearing body-shaming, lifestyle-shaming comments in the place those blessings should have been. Jeeti Raho reclaims them, and this year we're braiding that reclaiming into a community paranda-making workshop where anyone can sit down and braid their own paranda from scratch, alongside our usual night of live performance, poetry, and dance. Usually every year, parande are made by volunteers. Time and time again, the volunteers said making them is so fun, the ones who want a paranda should also experience the magic in making them.

We've built Paranda Party from the ground up with just a small team of organizers and a community of volunteers who keep showing up because this space matters to them too. Two years in, we've already brought together performers, poets, and hundreds of attendees for nights that didn't exist anywhere else in the Bay Area.

Your donation goes directly toward what makes Jeeti Raho possible: venue costs, honorariums for our performers and poets, workshop materials, and the printing of our collaborative zine, a physical piece of this community that people take home every year.