Highlight of Valentines Day took the shape a “romantic”
flick on Netflix called “Namaste Wahala,” which has labeled as a “Bollywood-Nollywood”
collaboration and tells the story of an Indian investment banker based on Lagos
Nigeria who falls in love with a Nigerian Lawyer called Didi.
Copyright – The Indian Express
The plot is cheesy (they fall in love after colliding on the
beach), which is part of the fun. There are the usual Bollywood dance scenes
too, though the songs are for the most part in English. Having said all that,
there is an underlying story, which is the story of acceptance of someone from
a different culture.
The first scene starts out when he visits her parents. Like
a good Indian boy, his automatic reaction is to touch the feet of his
perspective in laws. Upon seeing him, her father spits out his drink and goes
utterly nuts. She tries to assure her father that “he is a good man,” to which
he replies “there are plenty of good men, who are Nigerian.”
The second culture clash comes when his mother makes a
surprise visit and when he introduces her as his “girlfriend,” the reply from
mummy is “Oh, you mean a friend who is a girl or a female colleague,” refusing
to accept that the young African girl in front of her could be anything else to
her son.
I bring this up because interracial relations are probably the
last frontier of cracking racial and cultural divides. In our “modern – multi this
and that” age, we’ll make a song and dance about acceptance and diversity until
it hits home. This was brought home most clearly in the famous 1967 movie “Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner,” staring Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier. The shock of
having a “black” son-in-law is one thing, but its compounded by the fact that
he marched along with the civil rights movement. The father, played by Spencer
Tracy is a liberal who believes in equal rights to the black community but even
then, it’s a struggle for him to accept a black son-in-law who is exceedingly
qualified (he is a medical doctor). In fairness, the father of Sidney Poitier’s
character also thinks the “black and white” mix won’t work.
Much as differences are praised, we often look for similarities,
particularly when it comes to something as sensitive as a life partner. It’s
admittedly easier to have someone who looks similar, speaks the same language,
goes to the same church/temple/mosque etc and follows the same dietary laws. People
end up with people who are similar for the simple reason that it doesn’t
require too much ‘of a tough compromise. It’s a different story when you spend
your life with someone who is immersed in personal values which are fundamentally
different from yours.
This struggle is seen most clearly in the movie when the
girl tells her mother, “You of all people should understand – you’re a Youroba
Woman who married an Igbo Man.” The mother’s reply is “I just don’t’ want you
to go through the struggle.” The daughter’s reply is “Yes, but wasn’t it worth
it?”
Compromise does require struggle and it often requires a
little pain for all parties. However, if both parties believe it’s a struggle worth
going through, it often ends up being the case.
Which leads to the cheery point is that perhaps our efforts
to be a “united” people might not be as bleak as I and a few others have often
made them out to be. One of the more cheerful aspects from an otherwise
depressing news report on marriages was the fact that the number of
inter-ethnic marriages increased between 2009 and 2019, despite the fact that
the overall number of marriages had fallen and the number of divorces and
annulments had increased in that very same time period.
This is probably a good sign in as much as people are
willing to make cross cultural and ethnic compromises in the name of love. It
will, as the famous fictional Senator Bullworth says a sign that we can “f***
each other until we’re all one colour.” Surely that can only be a good thing.
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