By Our Special Correspondent
“Telugu language should be down in the dumps and we Telugu deserve this,” said a dejected Tanikella Bharani summing up in this way, the lack of affection among Telugus for their mother tongue. The feeble-yet-soul stirring comments were the first outburst of the writer turned actor while referring to a study that predicted Telugu as one of the languages moving towards extinction.
Bharani, who was in Tirupati to inaugurate the ‘5th Tirupati Book Festival’ last week, spoke on a variety of topics like literature, theatre and parallel cinema. He expressed shock at the number of English words sneaking in to an average conversation by quickly replacing commonly spoken Telugu words. “While Tamil, Kannada and Marathi people adore their language, admire their literature and patronize their theatre, do our people stand anywhere near?” he looked somewhat askance, with his probing eyes demanding a reply.
Though poetry is available in all languages, ‘Padyam’ is a delectable art form unique to Telugu that is readable as a sentence, recitative as a verse and can also be sung aloud. “Do our schools teach ‘Padyam’ to the children now?” he asked, trying to camouflage his anger with a smirk, reiterating the above remark, he said thus: “Telugu speaking people alone are responsible for the fall in the status of their language.”
After his stellar performance in Grahanam, which received critical acclaim in the parallel stream, Tanikella Bharani confined to directing short films like Ink, Key etc. Not many know that Grahanam was made out of frustration and that Bharani had taken up the role as a challenge after he was flooded with monotonous and insipid roles.
“Several of G.V. Chalam’s works deserved to be made into films and we started off with Grahanam”.
On theatre versus films, he says his 18 years of experience in theatre fetched him laurels, but films helped him make monetary gains. “The difference between the two is job satisfaction versus jebu (pocket) satisfaction”, he said with his inimitable wide grin. Instead of just bemoaning the fall in Telugu literature, Bharani has put his best foot forward by announcing to perform ‘Kanakabhishekam’ with 108 gold coins to excelling upcoming poets on July 14 (his birthday) every year.
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