Thursday, June 23, 2005

And so are the ilk!!

Pustak Mahal's Sudhish Pachauri says:
"No new truths are being told. Our new writer (of Hindi literature) is not talking about youth, or even new ideas. He is talking about his/her own inner conflicts. Those who write do so because they like the idea of being writers. They want awards, and they get them through networking... plying older authors and literary editors with favours and alcohol and parties. They are content with a certain amount of 'fame' that comes from having a book published and being mentioned in the mainstream newspapers.
Thats exactly similar to my wail over the state of affairs of my mother tongue telugu. Major throughput of the society in recent years has been Eenadu, Swathi, Sitara, Cinema and TV. Eenadu, though not as sensational as north Indian media, is about selling news as hot cakes (and not about being reflective in writings). Swathi is Andhra's version of People, Femina, Cosmopolitan along with a column on religion, some cheap erotica and a related QnA session. All of this nativized to the telugu tongue and then
packed together on newsprint for Rs.10/-.

Cinema is full of stories about boy appearing smart to the girl or the vice versa, Smart in telugu cinema's own lexicon, which when translated to spoken language can mean irritating and slappable. TV has promised itself to soap operas with subjects like Pati, Patni aur Woh, surrogacies, nonsensical family problems of which the roots normally date back to another 250 episodes. All of these sickening subjects moving at an alarming rate of 1 frame per 4 weeks...with expressions of a theater artist acting at a distance of 250 mts from the audience!! (You'll know what I mean, if you listen to their high volumed voices and if you look at those exaggarated Kathakali expressions).

Publishing: Visalaandhra is no longer flourishing as it used to once upon a time. The era of Viswanatha Satyanarayana, Sri Sri, Chaso, Devulapalli, Jashua, Narayana Reddy, Sankaramanchi, Mullapudi, Veturi is history now. Sirivennela, the last surviving legend, has penned a great song last in 1990 and good song for Gayam in 1993. Not that people have no new ideas, its that people stopped choosing Telugu as a medium of expression. Is it because of a low percieved reception? Those definitely are not signs of a flourishing language.

I cant ignore this ONE. Bhagwan Sathya Sai Baba has been delivering all His Divya Vani in Telugu. And yeah, thats something the rest of all lit. cannot even compete with.








1 comment:

vishwas said...

It appears that Telugu, as a language, does not attract as much fanatical adoration as, say, Tamil. Ade moola kAraNamu.

For a language, religion or tradition to develop and progress, it requires a base of hard-core users. Telugu is haemorrhaging such folks, as people are converting wholesale to the Engligh Language.

Earlier, parents used to send children to missionary schools to learn the Engligh language. Now that all schools teach English well, parents send their children to missionary schools to learn the best English accent. With such single-minded greed, it is hard for vernacular languages, traditions and even religion to survive.