I think and write in English. I can seamlessly yap in Hindi. But when I speak Telugu, it feels like a child showing off the first few words he just learnt in front of relatives.
And I do stand-up in Telugu, so my Telugu needs improvement not just to sound cool but also to make rent money.
So I tried.
If my Hindi starts sounding too Hyderabadi, I watch a few videos of Osho or Saurabh Dwivedi and the next morning I am throwing words like vyavastha and parichay into conversations. Nobody understands me, but at least I feel cool.
When I worked in a call centre, I had to improve my American accent. So I watched Friends. Two weeks later I was speaking like Jennifer Aniston from Kukatpally.
Naturally, I tried the same thing with Telugu.
People said, “Watch Garikipati.”
He is like Osho but slightly more judgemental.
I watched him for two days and his vocabulary started reflecting in my Telugu.
People began apologising to me for things they hadn’t even done.
In pursuit of becoming a Telugu pandit, I accidentally became a Catholic priest.
Then I tried Telugu films.
Telugu film dialogues are not cool. They are boiling with rage.
Every dialogue starts with a dramatic “Reeeiiii...”
By the time the hero finishes the sentence, the villain is still standing there because the director hasn’t said cut.
In real life, people would have already booked an Uber and left.
So I went looking for interviews.
In Hindi, actors sit for five-hour conversations about life and philosophy.
In Telugu, our stars don’t do interviews.
They do audio functions. Which is basically twenty people taking turns to praise each other and repeat old movie dialogues.
Maybe the answer was spending more time with Telugu people.
So I started paying attention to Telugu friend groups.
That’s when I made a discovery.
Telugu people don’t speak Telugu anymore.
They speak Tollywood.
In every Telugu gang, one person says a movie dialogue.
A second person responds with another movie dialogue.
A third person identifies the movie.
Everybody laughs.
Five minutes later they are debating whether Mahesh Babu or Ram Charan is greater.
At no point has anybody produced an original sentence.
I am convinced that half the Telugu population is communicating through recycled lines written by Trivikram over the last twenty years.
I was dating a Telugu girl who, like me, spoke three languages.
We joked in Hindi.
We had serious conversations in English.
But every fight happened in Telugu.
Every single one.
We were quirky in Hindi, philosophical in English and furious in Telugu.
To this day, I don’t understand how my worst vocabulary came from the language I supposedly knew the least.
Maybe that’s what Telugu is.
Maybe Telugu was never meant to sound cool.
Which explains why Telugu film dialogues sound like death threats, lecturers sound judgemental and news anchors sound like they are settling family disputes on live television.
And maybe that’s why there is no Telugu language imposition.
When it comes to language, Telugu people are far more interested in imposing Java, Python and C++ on their children.
At this rate, our grandchildren won’t have a mother tongue.
They’ll have a coding tongue.
Sandesh
@msgfromsandesh
(This comedian is here to tell funny stories about Hyderabad)
(The writer’s views are his own)