Wednesday, June 29, 2022 — 5
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Watch more Telugu movies (and 
listen to ThyGap!)

SMARANI KOMANDURI
MiC Columnist

Maybe I’m biased, but Telugu 
films never get the recognition 
they deserve. Only recently have 
Telugu films become more readily 
available in their original language 
via streaming platforms and screened 
in theaters worldwide, increasing 
accessibility. Out of the top 87 highest 
grossing Indian films to date, the 
Telugu films that are ranked are 
“Rangasthalam” (2018) at number 
74, “Sarileru Neekevvaru” (2020) 
at number 60, “Sye Raa Narasimha 
Reddy” (2019) at number 55, “Ala 
Vaikunthapurramuloo” 
(2020) 
at 
number 49, “Pushpa: The Rise – Part 
1” (2021) at number 23, “Baahubali: 
The Beginning” (2015) at number 10, 
“RRR” (2022) at number four and 
“Baahubali 2: The Conclusion” (2017) 
sits at number two.
Although Telugu films are slowly 
starting to make their marks on the 
charts, the Hindi film industry has 
always dominated popular notions 
of Indian cinema. Hindi actors and 
directors are the ones that have wax 
figures made of them at Madame 
Tussauds. They’re the ones that get to 
walk the red carpets, represent film 
festival panels and strike Hollywood 
deals.
Time after time we’ve witnessed 
the 
Hindi 
film 
industry 
take 
screenplays from the Telugu industry 
and other South Indian industries, and 
while the original Telugu screenplays 

have higher ratings, they’re still not 
as popular as their Hindi remakes. 
For example, many Hindi-film fans 
will know the iconic film “Rowdy 
Rathore” (2012) and its soundtrack, 
but many of those same fans would be 
shocked to find out that it is a remake 
of the Telugu movie “Vikramarkudu” 
(2006). The film even uses some of the 
same songs, just translated into Hindi! 
While “Vikramarkdu” has a 3.4 out 
of 5.0 rating on Letterboxd, “Rowdy 
Rathore” has a 2.3 rating. If you take 
a peek at that same list of the top 87 
highest-grossing Indian movies, you’ll 
see “Rowdy Rathore” at 87, while the 
original “Vikramarkudu” is nowhere 
to be found. 
Not only are some of the highest-
grossing Indian films just Hindi 
remakes of Telugu screenplays, some 
of these films go as far as to make fun 
of South Indian culture altogether. 
Films like “Ra.One” (2011) and 
“Chennai Express” (2013) are prime 
examples of films that stereotype 
South Indian culture, yet they’re some 
of the highest-grossing Indian films 
to date, ranking at number 80 and 19 
respectively.
So how can I convince you to pay 
more attention to the Telugu film 
industry? It’s not a task I can do alone, 
so I decided to sit down with the hosts 
of ThyGap Telugu Podcast. The hosts, 
using the pseudonyms BeingBrut and 
BogusNoog, review popular Telugu 
films, using sarcastic and witty humor 
to make anyone that can understand 
Telugu laugh until they have tears 
streaming down their faces. And 

luckily for you, if you don’t understand 
Telugu or have Telugu friends willing 
to translate, they also have an English 
podcast under the same name, 
ThyGap, which is just as entertaining. 
Brut, Bogus and I all feel that the 
Telugu film industry has the potential 
of showcasing stories on the same 
caliber as the Western and Hindi film 
industries. 
“Today, the fourth wall of movie-
making has been broken,” Brut 
explained. “You are no (longer) bound 
by your regional concepts, you’re 
no (longer) bound by the regional 
talent. We have the potential of being 
as good storytellers as the Western 
(and/or Hindi) movie industry, but 
we somehow don’t seem to be going 
in that direction. And the reason that 
was told before was that the audiences 
don’t want it.”
But did audiences truly not want 
it? Before streaming services became 
mainstream, that may have been the 
case. “There’s a lot more exposure of 
the Hindi-speaking audience to the 
Tamil content and Kannada content 
and Telugu content,” Brut said. Before 
streaming platforms, it was difficult 
to find films with subtitles, so unless 
you understood Telugu, you wouldn’t 
be able to watch a Telugu movie. But 
now that subtitles and closed captions 
are the default on streaming platforms 
and in theaters, that’s no longer a 
concern. “We feel like the audiences 
are ready,” Brut said.
We’ve seen Telugu screenwriters 
reuse Hindi scripts in the past. 
However, Brut, Bogus and I don’t 
think that will continue to be the case. 
We feel that Telugu storytellers are 
pioneering original content, especially 
with recent films like “RRR,” sparking 
conversation about whether this could 
be a potential Oscar submission from 
India for “Best Foreign Language 
Film.”
“(The Telugu film industry) just 
started off, but the road map looks 
really exciting, is what we can say,” 
Brut said. “Storytelling is obviously 
the core of any content making, so 
a better question to ask is: are there 
good storytellers now?”
Storytelling is an art and a skill in 
and of itself. We are all storytellers, 
or at least consume stories via one 
medium or another. Storytelling 
allows the Telugu film industry 
to share cultural experiences, and 
through those experiences we’re able 
to learn from and teach each other 
more about ourselves and the world. 

Read more at michigandaily.com

Beyond the promises 
of growth

MEERA KUMAR
MiC Columnist

At the farm, I’ve seen plants 
grow. A few days ago, I smoothed 
my fingers over thousands of black 
scallion seeds with a funky smell 
at the bottom of a glass container; 
the seeds rolled around in small yet 
persistent waves of water harvested 
from a pump on the farm. They stuck 
to my hands, even as I shook off 
water droplets. Hiding in my sleeve, 
under my nails, in between fingers, 
the yet-to-germinate black particles 
wouldn’t 
leave. 
Suddenly, 
their 
weight was noticeable.
My coworkers and boss were 
fascinated by the scallion seeds.
“How do they know what to do?” 
they marveled. 
“I wish I knew what I was 
supposed to do next,” another 
one remarked over their shoulder 
while we packed the seeds into 
small cartons of soil, designed to be 
transplanted once the scallions grow. 
To be fair, to be stationary and 
to have a functioning procedure 
for food and water consumption 
— which is your main concern for 
survival — decided before your 
ancestors’ 
ancestors 
were 
born 
doesn’t lead to analysis paralysis. To 
be a plant is to be that and nothing 
more (or less); they are fragile and 
ephemeral and feathery, and, yes, 
they feed and shelter much of the 
natural and built world. The entire 
life of the next generation is already 
written in their seeds before they 
flutter to the ground, never realizing 
the exhilarating taste of autonomy, 
nor the bitter, overwhelming flavor 
of possibility that makes you forget 

everything else you came for. 
In “Everything Everywhere All 
at Once,” a movie I have seen no less 
than three times in theaters, the 
main antagonist is Joy, a Queer Asian 
American girl with mommy issues. 
She is influenced by a giant everything 
bagel black hole of her own creation 
that inexplicably sucks in those in 
a tender, desperate state of mind. 
Joy, who is forced by her mother to 
always see all of her potential futures 
in an infinity of alternate timelines, 
collapses and puts it “all onto a bagel” 
(also with sesame and poppy seeds) 
that implodes under its own weight. 
This creates a dark void that sucks the 
goodness out of the worlds of those 
who come close to the bagel, those 
who cannot bear the unbearable 
weight of vision, of possibility, of life 
during late-stage capitalism. The 
movie shows that to exist in multiple 
timelines of what “could have been,” 
to be solely obsessed with countless 
possibilities, as Mitski and David 
Byrne sing in “This is a Life” during 
the end credits, “View of other worlds 
/ From our window sills / With the 
weight of eternity / At the speed of 
light” is to fracture the self.
But how can a fragmented self glue 
itself together? How can we scrape off 
the seeds we’ve longed for, the seeds 
that stick to us, in a world of extreme 
connectivity, an age of “opportunity,” 
with the highest worldwide average 
wealth recorded in history (adjusted 
for inflation) and more pretty people 
than we can process? If anyone can 
do “anything,” why haven’t we done 
what we’ve wanted to do? And what 
am I supposed to do?

Read more at michigandaily.com

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