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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.”

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