10/06/05 - Silver Chips Online - Montgomery Blair High School
10/06/05 - Silver Chips Online - Montgomery Blair High School
10/06/05 - Silver Chips Online - Montgomery Blair High School
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ilverCHIPS<br />
By PRIA ANAND<br />
Every day, juniors Ngaheteh and<br />
Maheteh Ngombi arrive home to a<br />
living room rife with culture. On<br />
one wall, three elephants stampede<br />
out of an enormous copper clock in<br />
the shape of Africa. Against another<br />
are rows of wood carvings from<br />
Sierra Leone, where the Ngombis<br />
lived until 2000. Across the room<br />
is a bookshelf weighed down by a<br />
television, a DVD player and an assortment<br />
of silver-and-blue African<br />
sculptures: hippos in suits, men<br />
thinking, women nursing.<br />
But just a few feet away, atop a<br />
carved wooden coffee table supported<br />
by two elephant trunks and<br />
next to a row of leering Nile crocodiles,<br />
lies a stack of movies whose<br />
titles don’t fit with the Ngombis’<br />
African decor: “Yeh Hai Jalwa.”<br />
“Rishtey.” “Planet Bollywood.”<br />
Since their time in Sierra Leone,<br />
the Ngombis have been devotees of<br />
the “Bollywood” culture spawned<br />
by the prolific Indian film industry<br />
based in the city of Mumbai,<br />
formerly Bombay. According to<br />
“Bollywood Premiere” magazine,<br />
“Bombay Hollywood” currently<br />
sells more tickets and produces<br />
more films than any other film<br />
industry in the world, and its influence<br />
is on the rise: Beyond South<br />
Asia and the South Asian diaspora,<br />
Bollywood films have generated a<br />
wide following in the Middle East,<br />
parts of Africa and even in the<br />
United States. The singing, dancing,<br />
formulaic plots and wholesome<br />
escapism that have long been the<br />
hallmarks of Bollywood films have<br />
found a way to resonate across<br />
oceans — and across cultures.<br />
“One movie...lots of entertainment”<br />
For the Ngombis, a large part<br />
of Bollywood’s attraction lies in its<br />
song-and-dance sequences. No film<br />
is complete without at least <strong>10</strong>, and<br />
the Ngombis have amassed many of<br />
them on an impressive collection of<br />
DVD compilations.<br />
It’s 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 13, and<br />
Ngaheteh is furiously forwarding<br />
through the early scenes of<br />
“Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,” the first<br />
Bollywood movie the Ngombis<br />
rented in the United States. “Let<br />
me show you my favorite song!”<br />
she exclaims, flipping through shots<br />
of colorful saris and impromptu<br />
choreography.<br />
Although Ngaheteh doesn’t<br />
speak Hindi, the language the<br />
movie is in, she’s picked up enough<br />
to sing along with the familiar refrain.<br />
Sometimes, she says, she’ll<br />
accidentally start singing Hindi<br />
songs while sitting in class. “I just<br />
like the language, the way it sounds<br />
when they sing,” she explains. Still,<br />
the Ngombis don’t own many Bollywood<br />
CDs: They prefer seeing the<br />
elaborate group dance numbers and<br />
continuous costume changes that<br />
accompany every song.<br />
Senior Rachel Martin, who first<br />
became interested in Bollywood<br />
through an Indian dance class, has<br />
always been drawn to Bollywood<br />
dancing. “I love the dancing; it’s<br />
so artistic,” she says. “It’s like that’s<br />
what’s going on in their heads.”<br />
Martin, who sometimes performs<br />
Bollywood numbers for<br />
campers at a local YMCA and at<br />
events like <strong>Blair</strong> Fair, has toyed with<br />
the idea of a future in Bollywood.<br />
“They’re like musicals, except you<br />
don’t have to sing!” she laughs, alluding<br />
to most Bollywood actors’<br />
obvious lip-syncing. “Sometimes<br />
I think that would be exactly what<br />
I would want to do, except for the<br />
part that I’m not Indian and I don’t<br />
speak Hindi.”<br />
This amalgam of music and<br />
movement is a driving force behind<br />
October 6, 20<strong>05</strong><br />
Bollywood’s magnetism, says <strong>Blair</strong><br />
tennis coach David Ngbea, who<br />
grew up watching Hindi movies<br />
in Nigeria. “In one movie, you get<br />
lots of entertainment,” he explains.<br />
“There is romance and music and<br />
plenty of dancing, and all of the actors<br />
and actresses are pretty, except<br />
for the bad guys.”<br />
And, adds Ngbea, some of these<br />
features are able to bridge the gap<br />
between South Asian culture and<br />
his own. “The beat of Indian music<br />
is very deep,” he says. “It’s almost<br />
like the beat of African music.”<br />
A family affair<br />
Perhaps for this reason, in Nigeria,<br />
Ngbea found himself constantly<br />
exposed to Bollywood culture.<br />
“Indian movies in Nigeria were<br />
advertised on billboards, in papers,<br />
even shown to us in high school,”<br />
he says. Fridays and Saturdays<br />
were “movie days” at Ngbea’s<br />
school, where the entire student<br />
body would watch a movie together<br />
— always a Bollywood film or an<br />
American cowboy movie.<br />
For Ngbea, there was no contest<br />
between the genres: The simple<br />
ENTERTAINMENT 23<br />
olling out the red carpet for Indian films<br />
Bollywood movies breach cultural barriers and reach wide audiences with common appeal<br />
The beat of Indian<br />
music is very<br />
deep. It’s almost<br />
like the beat of<br />
African music.”<br />
predictability of Bollywood films<br />
appealed to him far more than<br />
Hollywood gore. “Cowboy movies<br />
always ended up with someone<br />
being killed,” he recalls. “In Indian<br />
movies, what you expected would<br />
happen: The bad guys would end<br />
up empty handed, the lady would<br />
end up with the man she was in<br />
love with. It ended in an amicable<br />
manner — there was fighting, but<br />
no killing.”<br />
But it’s not just the nature of<br />
Bollywood fighting that allows the<br />
Ngombis to watch Hindi films with<br />
their mother and sisters. Ngaheteh<br />
explains that she simply feels more<br />
comfortable watching Bollywood<br />
films. “Bollywood films have more<br />
love and no lust,” she says.<br />
Ngaheteh says that this reserve<br />
is something her culture has in<br />
common with Bollywood films, a<br />
sentiment senior Ramatu Ibrahim<br />
has also found to be true. Ibrahim<br />
grew up in Sierra Leone, where<br />
Hindi movies pervaded the entertainment<br />
industry. Now, Ibrahim<br />
actively seeks out Bollywood<br />
films to watch with her family<br />
because she finds them more modest<br />
than their western counterparts.<br />
Graphic by<br />
Camille<br />
Mackler<br />
“They’re more appropriate for my<br />
family,” she explains. “There’s no<br />
kissing and no sex; they’re mostly<br />
about love.”<br />
Cultural notions of what’s appropriate<br />
are part of what makes<br />
Bollywood films so adept at bridging<br />
geographic barriers, according<br />
to Jigna Desai, author of the book<br />
“Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural<br />
Politics of South Asian Diasporic<br />
Film.” “For a lot of people, culture<br />
is not about where you are,” she<br />
explains in a phone interview. “It’s<br />
about what values you have.”<br />
And, adds Desai, these values<br />
are distinct from those of western<br />
films. “They’re about being modern<br />
in a particular way, but still<br />
holding on to whatever traditions<br />
appeal to you,” she says. “They’re<br />
about holding on to a notion of ethnicity<br />
or difference or culture that<br />
they distinguish from the west.”<br />
Differences aside, it’s Bollywood’s<br />
ability to transcend national<br />
boundaries that has kept Ibrahim<br />
coming back for more. She explains,<br />
“Even if you don’t know the<br />
language, when you see the stars,<br />
you can understand what they’re<br />
talking about.”<br />
ublishing dream comes true for English teacher<br />
By JEFF GUO<br />
-tennis coach<br />
David Ngbea<br />
On May 17, 1974, a swarm of 400 police<br />
officers and FBI agents converged on a little<br />
bungalow in south-central Los Angeles.<br />
Their target: the Symbionese Liberation<br />
Army (SLA), an anarchist group infamous<br />
for the kidnapping and brainwashing of<br />
newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.<br />
The police gave the SLA members 15<br />
minutes to leave the house, but no one did.<br />
Someone started shooting. In the ensuing<br />
gunfight, the house erupted into flames.<br />
Everyone inside died.<br />
English resource teacher Vickie Adamson<br />
remembers being shocked. She recognized<br />
the address: 1466 East 54th Street. It had<br />
been her family’s home two years prior.<br />
This unsettling coincidence is one of the<br />
many experiences that Adamson drew on<br />
to write her upcoming novel, “The Color of<br />
Love: A Romance in Black and White,” expected<br />
to be released later this year by online<br />
publisher IUniverse.com. While Adamson<br />
is hesitant to reveal details, she admits<br />
that the book, though fictional, is structured<br />
around her own life. “If I started generally<br />
describing the premise of the book, people<br />
would say, ‘Well that’s you, isn’t it!’” she<br />
says, laughing. And there is no doubt that<br />
the roots of the book run deep.<br />
A lifetime in the making<br />
Adamson has always loved to write, even<br />
as a little girl. “Every<br />
day, I would go home<br />
and I would stick paper<br />
in the typewriter<br />
and type,” she says.<br />
At nine, she finished<br />
her first play, “The<br />
Surprise Present.”<br />
She still keeps a copy<br />
of it tucked away in a<br />
drawer at home.<br />
This love of writing<br />
followed Adamson<br />
through college,<br />
where she received<br />
a bachelor’s degree<br />
in English and a<br />
master’s in African-<br />
American Literature,<br />
both at the University<br />
of California, Los<br />
Angeles.<br />
Then, she jumped into the hectic world of<br />
teaching. Adamson was suddenly too busy<br />
to write, or even read, for pleasure. The<br />
problem has followed her to this day. “I find<br />
I am so bogged down in papers, paperwork<br />
and just the bureaucracy of being a teacher,”<br />
she says. “Unless I’m very deliberate about<br />
making time for [writing], it doesn’t happen.”<br />
But at the same time, Adamson began to<br />
tinker with the idea of a novel that explored<br />
the issues of race, gender and class — issues<br />
that had followed her from her child-<br />
Vickie Adamson leads a lively class<br />
discussion. Photo by Hannah Rosen<br />
hood in Los Angeles.<br />
She finally sat down<br />
and began writing<br />
the book in 1993. Because<br />
her busy school<br />
life forced her to work<br />
mostly during the<br />
summer or while on<br />
maternity leave, it<br />
took Adamson nine<br />
years to complete the<br />
novel.<br />
She shared the finished<br />
manuscript with<br />
her friends and family.<br />
They all loved it, but<br />
Adamson was reluctant<br />
when they urged<br />
her to publish. The<br />
novel, after all, was<br />
a personal endeavor.<br />
She had written it<br />
with just her close friends in mind. And she<br />
was wary of publishing companies, which<br />
she knew to be reluctant about printing the<br />
works of first-time authors. “Breaking into<br />
the publishing world would take a lot of<br />
time, energy and commitment,” she says.<br />
IUniverse to the rescue<br />
Adamson began to change her mind this<br />
past April, when she came across an article<br />
in “The New York Times” describing online<br />
companies, such as IUniverse.com and Xli-<br />
bris.com, that will, for a fee, publish manuscripts<br />
and make them available on online<br />
bookshops.<br />
This system of publishing appealed to<br />
Adamson: She didn’t want to spend months<br />
on end pitching to reluctant editors at com-<br />
“It just seemed so<br />
easy and so inviting.”<br />
-English resource teacher<br />
Vickie Adamson<br />
panies like Random House or Scholastic.<br />
The online companies offered to publish her<br />
novel hassle-free. “It just seemed so easy<br />
and so inviting,” she says. “They are presenting<br />
an opportunity for you to publish<br />
and then determine whether or not you have<br />
readership.”<br />
Adamson is now in the final steps of publishing<br />
her book with IUniverse.com. She<br />
can’t wait to finally hold the finished copy<br />
of her book in her hands. “There’s a feeling<br />
of excitement, of thinking that my book will<br />
actually arrive and that people can have it<br />
and read it and respond to it,” she says, smiling.<br />
“Whether or not they like it, just the fact<br />
that it can happen is a wonderful thing. I’m<br />
thrilled.”