10/06/05 - Silver Chips Online - Montgomery Blair High School

ilverCHIPS
By PRIA ANAND
Every day, juniors Ngaheteh and
Maheteh Ngombi arrive home to a
living room rife with culture. On
one wall, three elephants stampede
out of an enormous copper clock in
the shape of Africa. Against another
are rows of wood carvings from
Sierra Leone, where the Ngombis
lived until 2000. Across the room
is a bookshelf weighed down by a
television, a DVD player and an assortment
of silver-and-blue African
sculptures: hippos in suits, men
thinking, women nursing.
But just a few feet away, atop a
carved wooden coffee table supported
by two elephant trunks and
next to a row of leering Nile crocodiles,
lies a stack of movies whose
titles don’t fit with the Ngombis’
African decor: “Yeh Hai Jalwa.”
“Rishtey.” “Planet Bollywood.”
Since their time in Sierra Leone,
the Ngombis have been devotees of
the “Bollywood” culture spawned
by the prolific Indian film industry
based in the city of Mumbai,
formerly Bombay. According to
“Bollywood Premiere” magazine,
“Bombay Hollywood” currently
sells more tickets and produces
more films than any other film
industry in the world, and its influence
is on the rise: Beyond South
Asia and the South Asian diaspora,
Bollywood films have generated a
wide following in the Middle East,
parts of Africa and even in the
United States. The singing, dancing,
formulaic plots and wholesome
escapism that have long been the
hallmarks of Bollywood films have
found a way to resonate across
oceans — and across cultures.
“One movie...lots of entertainment”
For the Ngombis, a large part
of Bollywood’s attraction lies in its
song-and-dance sequences. No film
is complete without at least 10, and
the Ngombis have amassed many of
them on an impressive collection of
DVD compilations.
It’s 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 13, and
Ngaheteh is furiously forwarding
through the early scenes of
“Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,” the first
Bollywood movie the Ngombis
rented in the United States. “Let
me show you my favorite song!”
she exclaims, flipping through shots
of colorful saris and impromptu
choreography.
Although Ngaheteh doesn’t
speak Hindi, the language the
movie is in, she’s picked up enough
to sing along with the familiar refrain.
Sometimes, she says, she’ll
accidentally start singing Hindi
songs while sitting in class. “I just
like the language, the way it sounds
when they sing,” she explains. Still,
the Ngombis don’t own many Bollywood
CDs: They prefer seeing the
elaborate group dance numbers and
continuous costume changes that
accompany every song.
Senior Rachel Martin, who first
became interested in Bollywood
through an Indian dance class, has
always been drawn to Bollywood
dancing. “I love the dancing; it’s
so artistic,” she says. “It’s like that’s
what’s going on in their heads.”
Martin, who sometimes performs
Bollywood numbers for
campers at a local YMCA and at
events like Blair Fair, has toyed with
the idea of a future in Bollywood.
“They’re like musicals, except you
don’t have to sing!” she laughs, alluding
to most Bollywood actors’
obvious lip-syncing. “Sometimes
I think that would be exactly what
I would want to do, except for the
part that I’m not Indian and I don’t
speak Hindi.”
This amalgam of music and
movement is a driving force behind
October 6, 2005
Bollywood’s magnetism, says Blair
tennis coach David Ngbea, who
grew up watching Hindi movies
in Nigeria. “In one movie, you get
lots of entertainment,” he explains.
“There is romance and music and
plenty of dancing, and all of the actors
and actresses are pretty, except
for the bad guys.”
And, adds Ngbea, some of these
features are able to bridge the gap
between South Asian culture and
his own. “The beat of Indian music
is very deep,” he says. “It’s almost
like the beat of African music.”
A family affair
Perhaps for this reason, in Nigeria,
Ngbea found himself constantly
exposed to Bollywood culture.
“Indian movies in Nigeria were
advertised on billboards, in papers,
even shown to us in high school,”
he says. Fridays and Saturdays
were “movie days” at Ngbea’s
school, where the entire student
body would watch a movie together
— always a Bollywood film or an
American cowboy movie.
For Ngbea, there was no contest
between the genres: The simple
ENTERTAINMENT 23
olling out the red carpet for Indian films
Bollywood movies breach cultural barriers and reach wide audiences with common appeal
The beat of Indian
music is very
deep. It’s almost
like the beat of
African music.”
predictability of Bollywood films
appealed to him far more than
Hollywood gore. “Cowboy movies
always ended up with someone
being killed,” he recalls. “In Indian
movies, what you expected would
happen: The bad guys would end
up empty handed, the lady would
end up with the man she was in
love with. It ended in an amicable
manner — there was fighting, but
no killing.”
But it’s not just the nature of
Bollywood fighting that allows the
Ngombis to watch Hindi films with
their mother and sisters. Ngaheteh
explains that she simply feels more
comfortable watching Bollywood
films. “Bollywood films have more
love and no lust,” she says.
Ngaheteh says that this reserve
is something her culture has in
common with Bollywood films, a
sentiment senior Ramatu Ibrahim
has also found to be true. Ibrahim
grew up in Sierra Leone, where
Hindi movies pervaded the entertainment
industry. Now, Ibrahim
actively seeks out Bollywood
films to watch with her family
because she finds them more modest
than their western counterparts.
Graphic by
Camille
Mackler
“They’re more appropriate for my
family,” she explains. “There’s no
kissing and no sex; they’re mostly
about love.”
Cultural notions of what’s appropriate
are part of what makes
Bollywood films so adept at bridging
geographic barriers, according
to Jigna Desai, author of the book
“Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural
Politics of South Asian Diasporic
Film.” “For a lot of people, culture
is not about where you are,” she
explains in a phone interview. “It’s
about what values you have.”
And, adds Desai, these values
are distinct from those of western
films. “They’re about being modern
in a particular way, but still
holding on to whatever traditions
appeal to you,” she says. “They’re
about holding on to a notion of ethnicity
or difference or culture that
they distinguish from the west.”
Differences aside, it’s Bollywood’s
ability to transcend national
boundaries that has kept Ibrahim
coming back for more. She explains,
“Even if you don’t know the
language, when you see the stars,
you can understand what they’re
talking about.”
ublishing dream comes true for English teacher
By JEFF GUO
-tennis coach
David Ngbea
On May 17, 1974, a swarm of 400 police
officers and FBI agents converged on a little
bungalow in south-central Los Angeles.
Their target: the Symbionese Liberation
Army (SLA), an anarchist group infamous
for the kidnapping and brainwashing of
newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
The police gave the SLA members 15
minutes to leave the house, but no one did.
Someone started shooting. In the ensuing
gunfight, the house erupted into flames.
Everyone inside died.
English resource teacher Vickie Adamson
remembers being shocked. She recognized
the address: 1466 East 54th Street. It had
been her family’s home two years prior.
This unsettling coincidence is one of the
many experiences that Adamson drew on
to write her upcoming novel, “The Color of
Love: A Romance in Black and White,” expected
to be released later this year by online
publisher IUniverse.com. While Adamson
is hesitant to reveal details, she admits
that the book, though fictional, is structured
around her own life. “If I started generally
describing the premise of the book, people
would say, ‘Well that’s you, isn’t it!’” she
says, laughing. And there is no doubt that
the roots of the book run deep.
A lifetime in the making
Adamson has always loved to write, even
as a little girl. “Every
day, I would go home
and I would stick paper
in the typewriter
and type,” she says.
At nine, she finished
her first play, “The
Surprise Present.”
She still keeps a copy
of it tucked away in a
drawer at home.
This love of writing
followed Adamson
through college,
where she received
a bachelor’s degree
in English and a
master’s in African-
American Literature,
both at the University
of California, Los
Angeles.
Then, she jumped into the hectic world of
teaching. Adamson was suddenly too busy
to write, or even read, for pleasure. The
problem has followed her to this day. “I find
I am so bogged down in papers, paperwork
and just the bureaucracy of being a teacher,”
she says. “Unless I’m very deliberate about
making time for [writing], it doesn’t happen.”
But at the same time, Adamson began to
tinker with the idea of a novel that explored
the issues of race, gender and class — issues
that had followed her from her child-
Vickie Adamson leads a lively class
discussion. Photo by Hannah Rosen
hood in Los Angeles.
She finally sat down
and began writing
the book in 1993. Because
her busy school
life forced her to work
mostly during the
summer or while on
maternity leave, it
took Adamson nine
years to complete the
novel.
She shared the finished
manuscript with
her friends and family.
They all loved it, but
Adamson was reluctant
when they urged
her to publish. The
novel, after all, was
a personal endeavor.
She had written it
with just her close friends in mind. And she
was wary of publishing companies, which
she knew to be reluctant about printing the
works of first-time authors. “Breaking into
the publishing world would take a lot of
time, energy and commitment,” she says.
IUniverse to the rescue
Adamson began to change her mind this
past April, when she came across an article
in “The New York Times” describing online
companies, such as IUniverse.com and Xli-
bris.com, that will, for a fee, publish manuscripts
and make them available on online
bookshops.
This system of publishing appealed to
Adamson: She didn’t want to spend months
on end pitching to reluctant editors at com-
“It just seemed so
easy and so inviting.”
-English resource teacher
Vickie Adamson
panies like Random House or Scholastic.
The online companies offered to publish her
novel hassle-free. “It just seemed so easy
and so inviting,” she says. “They are presenting
an opportunity for you to publish
and then determine whether or not you have
readership.”
Adamson is now in the final steps of publishing
her book with IUniverse.com. She
can’t wait to finally hold the finished copy
of her book in her hands. “There’s a feeling
of excitement, of thinking that my book will
actually arrive and that people can have it
and read it and respond to it,” she says, smiling.
“Whether or not they like it, just the fact
that it can happen is a wonderful thing. I’m
thrilled.”