After some serious phone chats over whether/not to buy the mobile(!?), finally my mother and I agreed for a trade off over a PDA+Mobile, which becomes the so called, Smart phone. So, I told her pretty confidently that I would get it this week, because this is THE Hyderabad, the silly Silicon Valley of India, only next to B'lore! God damn it!! Not a single new release of handhelds with the bare minimum features that I require, could be found in THE stores of the city. Vexed and pissed off, got back to college with some chicken biryani form Sri Kanya, hoping it could help with the situation and I'm happy it did, to some extent, at least, it so convinced me that Hyderabad is not a total bullshit place and it still holds something of value!

Sorry all those Hyderabadis & Hyderabad lovers, I couldn't just digest the FACT that we are still the people who beg and not demand, even the times when we are paying for something we are begging!! Just to let you know why I'm writing this, the guy at Planet-M, one of those mobile stores, asks, why do you need Telugu in mobiles, Sir? Unlike my normal response which used to be an angry frustrated look and some raw explanation with crude bad language mixed with it, I responded with something different. Having gained some experience now, I was able to control that hormonal flush inside me and I explained him how the world has changed over last 10 years, if not 200 years. He still tried to argue German, French etc are international languages and *WE*, a bunch of common helpless Indians, speaking Indian languages, should not expect the same for Telugu and other Indian languages. Because they are *not* International! Now, this really put my patience to a stress test! I thought, thats the limit!! Yet, I still responded calmly asking what made him say that and told him that there are more Telugu(and of course, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and many other) speaking people than there are people speaking those *International* languages. This seemed to work! He smiled with that familiar *hmm-i-dont-have-a-counter* look and kept quiet. And after some time, some other things crept in and thats how it ended.

Really men(and women, if you anyway mind this, with an exception of a few), is that it? Should that inferiority be a de-facto thing in us?? Why don't we demand!! Why do we al.....lways beg??!! We can't after all leave that habit of 200 years, huh???

An autowala in a conversation with me, says, "Bhai, inka telugu ennalluntundi cheppandi? Rajadhanantha urdu, english, hindi lone vuntundi, ee paristhiti rastram lo chudadaniki pedda time pattadu bhai, manam em chestam cheppandi?" it means, "Bhai, how long do you think is Telugu's future? Today, all over Hyderabad it's either Urdu, English or Hindi. I don't think it'll take much time for this to get reflected all over the state. What can we do?".

A language with Ancient Status, with nearly 10 crore whopping number of people speaking that very pitiful language... If this is what people think of it, then it just proves how helpless and hopeless they are! And it's not the situation of this single state. It's the situation with every god forsaken Indian Language!

See to it that you understand that I love English as a common medium of communication all over the world (And that's the reason I'm writing this in English, instead of Telugu. So that guys from my country, not my state alone, should be able to read this). But that fact alone could NEVER let you undermine your own mother tongue.

I hope you understand it's time to wake up! You need not do something exceptional to pay attention to your own language. Just use it as much as possible in life and it'll come back to life, automatically. Today, I take this opportunity to convey my condolences to all those disabled people, who neither knew English(which they think they knew better than their mother tongue), nor can speak their own mother tongue in a proper manner.

And I pledge that I would never commit myself to a device that couldn't serve my simple purpose!