HITS AMID THE BOMBS
Palestine’s love affair with Hindi cinema thrives amid strife and uncertainty. Young fans celebrate Holi, rent lehengas for weddings and dance like Katrina Kaif
Every week, Aya Abassi, 26, sets up a camera in a corner of her office in East Jerusalem and records videos for her YouTube channel, where she talks about Bollywood and teaches Hindi to thousands of Arabic speakers. She learned the language by watching the movies. “If you say the word ‘Palestine,’ the first thing that comes to mind is war,” Aya says, “This is something I want to change by these kind of videos. I want people to know that we live like anybody else… Of course, it’s a war zone. We’re Occupied, but we have people who learn languages, who take photos, who make great films; we have books that have been translated into a lot of languages around the world. We have a normal life, we want to live a normal life.”
In Hindi, she talks about newly released trailers. In Arabic, she teaches Hindi through film dialogue — among her favourites are “Sallu Bhai” movies, and that long line from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, “Zindagi mein kuch banna ho, kuch hasil karna ho, kuch jeetna ho, toh hamesha apne dil ki suno (In life, if you want to be someone, do something, win, then always listen to your heart)”. She also translates the lines into Arabic, one word at a time. And she has thousands tuning in to listen and learn.
Aya has never visited India; she’s learnt all about it through a decade-long, relentless pursuit of Bollywood. It began on a boring summer afternoon when she decided to watch Taal (1999). She watched more Hindi movies to see if all Indian women look like Aishwarya Rai. She started humming the songs. And then she and her sisters started picking up Hindi words and using them in place of Arabic ones in conversation.
Aya would sometimes watch as many as four films in a row, in those early years. Her mother became alarmed. No more TV, she warned Aya. “Mom, I really can speak Hindi now,” Aya argued.
“Walk away from the screen. If you tell me exactly what the translation says on the screen, you can come back here and I’ll bring you more DVDs,” her mother said. She passed the test and got her DVDs.
Bollywood’s popularity in the Middle East is not new. There are fans in the Emirates, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, and the films are written about in essays and news reports. But the Palestinians’ love affair with Bollywood is largely (and surprisingly) undocumented.
In Jerusalem, Arab cab drivers burst into Hindi songs when they discover a passenger is from “Al Hind” (India). In Ramallah, young men declare that “Indians are more beautiful than even Palestinians”.
In 2015, young Palestinians got together to celebrate Holi in Ramallah. When Amir Abu Alsaoud, 27, a tour guide from Nablus, watched Border, he said “it reminded me of how Israel is controlling all the borders here, and more than 500 checkpoints in the West Bank. Some scenes reminded me of the terrible era when there was a blockade around Nablus, nobody could enter, nobody could leave”. In 2011, when Indian- American civil rights attorney Radhika Sainath spent three months in Gaza, it was assumed that she and her husband had had a great love story because Indian people, Gazans inferred from the movies, all had great love stories.
NAME DROPPING
Everywhere in Palestinian territories, if you’re Indian, three or four names will follow you: Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Katrina Kaif. They wouldn’t know who Nawazuddin Siddiqui is, Aya says, or that Salman dated Aishwarya before and then she was with Vivek Oberoi before she married
Abhishek Bachchan.
Aya watches Koffee with Karan, Bigg Boss (“because it’s diverse people from all across India and you get to learn different accents”), and four Hindi films a week.
Part of the reason for Bollywood’s popularity in Palestine and across the Middle East is that the conservative family values and restrained romances starring Indian Muslim actors feel familiar to Arab audiences. And yet it is a culture different enough to also entice by its foreignness.
“One of the things when I was younger, I really looked forward to seeing, but every time, I just didn’t: a kiss!” says Alsaoud.
Aya, on the other hand, wouldn’t allow her younger sisters to watch Emraan Hashmi movies. “We used to see a hug and be like, ‘Oh my God, no, don’t hug in front of us’,” says Israa, 23, who works at a travel agency. “And now you see Varun and Alia and Siddharth and they’re going crazy. They’re doing it all. And I’m like, okay, do whatever you want.”
The religious diversity on and off the screen — particularly the inter-faith marriages — puzzled Aya too. Muslim residents of East Jerusalem are subject to Israeli marriage law, and interfaith marriages can only take place abroad.
“So Shah Rukh Khan is Muslim, Gauri is not. Hrithik was Hindu, Sussanne was not. How is that possible,” she says.
More confusing still was when she learnt that Shah Rukh Khan “taught his children that you choose whatever you want. Like, if you want to be a Muslim, you can be Muslim. If you want to be a Hindu, you can be Hindu. Masjid and mandir, they go to both.”
SHAADIVAADI
Bollywood has infiltrated Palestinian weddings too, where brides now rent lehengas for as much as 6,000 Israeli shekels (about Rs 1 lakh) and dance to Hindi film music at henna ceremonies (Mashallah from Ek Tha Tiger, Pinga from Bajirao Mastani and Dola Re Dola from Devdas are favourites).
Wedding-wear boutiques have begun to stock lehengas and anarkalis. At TrueBlue, a three-storey store in Ramallah, the entire top floor is dedicated to these outfits.
Mohannad Ezzat Adhami, owner of the store, travels to Delhi every year to buy two dozen lehengas. The new ones are rented by brides. Friends and other relatives rent cheaper, older lehengas for restricted membership while the licence regime made it hard to procure equipment. The Army and Navy dominated the scene, giving the leisure activity a competitive spin. But with new institutes and clubs, there’s hope that top talent will come from modest backgrounds, as it does globally.
At the Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad, Suheim Sheikh, coach and president of the nine-year-old yacht club, has been training children of farmers, labourers, auto-drivers and waiters for free.
The club’s Naavika programme coaches girls, two of whom, Tungara Mahboobie and Lakshmi Nookarathnam, have been showing promise .
“We’re aiming to train 100 girls,” says Sheikh. “If you don’t have a large group of participants you don’t have competition.” He believes it’s possible to replicate the programme across India. “The perception is that this is a rich man’s sport. But access to water is less expensive than building a stadium. We started off with three boats; we now have 80.”
Aurofilio Schiavina, Pondicherry resident and member of a citizen’s action group PondiCan, says developing sailing helps ensure that everyone benefits from the new money and new interest in the region. “We saw it with surfers,” he says. “Kids of local fishermen took it up four years ago and are now part of a global community of surfers. There are no caste or about 500 shekels (Rs 9,000).
Setting the mood, Badtameez Dil (from Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani) plays on a screen near the counter. Helwa Al Bazar, a Palestinian-Brazilian saleswoman, swipes through pictures on her phone in which she is posing in a pink lehenga. Duah, her 17-year-old daughter who has dropped by after school, says she’s been watching Hindi films since she was 12.
“I told my mother,” she adds, “when I marry, I will wear a lehenga.” In the summer, says Nedal Jameel Alia, manager of the store, they rent out as many as 50 of the outfits. Aya’s elder sister wore a yellow and gold one for her henna party.
SOUL SISTERS
When Aya first started to make videos, five years ago, it was to connect with Indians. In 2012, she posted a video on August 15, saying, “Main saare Indian logon ko wish karna chahti hoon, ke bohot khushiyan manayein, aur yeh din har saal aajaaye tumhari country mein. Aur main wish karti hoon ki yeh din hamaari country bhi aajayega, Palestine mein. Taaki hum or tum log saath-saath mein khushiyan manayenge. (I want to wish all Indians, may you have many celebrations, may this day prevail every year in your country. And may it also come to our country too one day, to Palestine. So we can all celebrate together.”)
Last summer, Diwan Videos, a Dubai and Cairo-based digital aggregator of Arab videos, signed her on as an influencer. They host and promote her videos, and help her strategise. And although many of her videos are in Arabic, Aya, with 62,000 subscribers, continues to target her desi audience — nearly a fifth of the world’s population. “If I can show them that there is a place called Palestine… we have a lot of people who are interested in movies… that’s enough for me,” she says. social barriers. We want that with sailing.”
In Navi Mumbai, coach Malav Shroff competed in the Olympics in 2004. There are plans to train tribal Agri and Koli youngsters who already spend time on the water. Bhopal’s sailing school is showing results. Tomar is among a few who have been winning national championships.
NEW WAVE
There are rough waters ahead before India takes to sailing in any significant way. “To win at the Olympics we need at least 1 million sailors, not the handful we have,” says Aquasail’s Kudrolli. “Around the world, competitive sailing makes up just 2% of the activity, the rest is leisure sailing, people on sailboats with families and friends.”
He believes we’ll make more sailors with commerce than competitive training. “It’s still expensive to own your own sailboat,” he says referring to prices for a beginner-level vessel that start at Rs 1 lakh. “But corporate lessons and weekend classes get more people to experience what so many generations haven’t.”
If you can afford a boat, there are infrastructure issues. In the Mumbai harbour, there’s barely any place to moor it. Our coasts lack basic development, let alone full-fledged marinas. There’s also the stubborn misconception that a sailboat is luxury party yacht. “So many people want to drink on a boat,” says Kudrolli. For more on how Indian films are winning hearts in Palestine, go to hindustantimes. com / lifestyle
GIRLS, KIDS AND THE MIDDLECLASS ARE PART OF A TURNING TIDE IN INDIAN SAILING