HYDERABAD: Loved the series of thought-provoking posts where a bearded guy in a chequered shirt with sunglasses and looking like your boy-next-door turned angry young man posing with a cardboard placard? The placcards have sarcastic yet meaningful, colloquial Telugu messages such as ‘Mooskoni Masklu Veskondi’ or ‘Pellayye varaku aagandi?” It is by @TheTeluguDude on Instagram (9.7K followers), a team of three comprising Naveen from Karimanagar who’s settled in Hyderabad and is a political science student preparing for civils. He wants to be a political science professor in future. Naani from Machilipatnam, settled in Hyderabad, and Praneeth, born and brought up in Hyderabad are aspiring filmmakers. Naani writes, Naveen poses and Praneeth shoots.
The coming together
We are buddies who bond over creativity. We always wanted to do something together and luckily the lockdown gave us that opportunity after Naveen grew his beard and posted a picture on our WhatsApp group saying “Cast Me In Your Films”. After a while, Naani came up with this idea of holding placards in the public and expressing our thoughts. The instagram page DUDEWITHSIGN was our reference point, we wanted to localise it in Telugu with relatable and trending content. Then we created pages on all social media platforms. Naveen did a test shoot at his place and posted in the group. It seemed great and we launched the page on May 21.
Posts that resonate
Our first post, “Mooskoni Masklu Veskondi” is the instant hit as it was timely. The posts which are targeted at the youth like “pellayye varku aagandi”, “Hmm ani reply ivvadam aapandi” have worked really well. Our posts on the trending topics like our Father’s Day post, are instant hits. Recently, we went to Gandhi Hospital and clicked a picture which says “Arey babu, Testlu cheyyandra” but that same evening a press note was released saying that the tests are getting increased from tomorrow. We couldn’t post that.
Content is core:
We are not here to give gyaa but post about what we experience in our day to day lives and is relatable to everyone. A lot of people don’t voice out their opinions fearing that others would get offended. We want to be their voice, bu with wit.
Female following
We do have a lot of female following. We shot outside Chaitanya Junior College was a big hit among the inter students and girls. We have 60-40 ratio of boys and girls. We get a lot of appreciation messages from the girls and they keep sending us lines to post. On the other hand, we have boys who think Naveen should act in films as a psycho. The response has been extremely overwhelming.
In the public eye
Since we shoot in the public, we attract a lot of eye balls. Sometimes we get instant appreciation from them. In one instance, We were shooting this line “Inka? Ani analsoste phone petteyandi” we were shooting at a coconut water stall with a dog watching at the board. The coconut seller asked us what’s written on the board, we told him. He got very excited and told we were right and he was just talking to his girlfriend about the same. There are also instances where people got offended because they thought we were shooting them.
The placard
The only major issue we faced was getting the cardboard boxes. People actually comment asking where do we get so many boxes from. Initially, We used the boxes which we had at our house. The boxes which comes with the appliances. Those lasted us only for one shoot. Then, After a lot of struggle Naveen got in touch with a medical distributor who supplied us a lot of those boxes.
— Manju Latha Kalanidhi kalanidhi@newindianexpress.com @mkalanidhi