The untold Irony and decline of Telugu Society
By: Naren Yellavula
Tags: Telugu, Morality, Society, India, Education

Telugu states are well known for spicy food, cinema craze, and American dreams. Everything looks colorful and satisfying. I am going to tell a story with many real examples to insiders as well as outsiders who don’t know what happens within the Telugus. This article is not to hurt anyone but for putting my observation and research by correlating the facts with the help of some statistics. It is an effort to self assess ourselves as a Telugu society. The great society with amazing culture once produced greats like Sri-Sri and Dasarathi is losing its soul. What triggered me to write this piece of text is the recent incident of Telugu students arrests in the USA for ‘Pay to Stay.’

Story begins

Telugus are god feared, traditional people with a long well-known history. Telugu too is a plain language with just 60 symbols(16 vowels, 41 consonants, three vowel modifiers) in its script that can express all possible sounds in the Telugu language. It is a piece of cake for new learners!

Telugu is a Dravidian language

The same set of people who are excellent and brilliant over many decades in the past are pushed into a delirium of thoughts and practices which can eventually cause the downfall of this high society. There are many reasons why the kids who are brought up in these states do not have ethical values anymore. Let me put them one by one. You will be surprised!

Education System

The education system in India, especially in Telugu states(Andhra Pradesh & Telangana), is destroyed over the past decade by making kids into goal achieving machines instead of turning them into team players with multiple skills. Parents and teachers are to blame here. Parents never trusted the government schools and put their kids into private schools. Teachers instead of making students grasp the subjects, tried to push pupils to by-heart the whole lessons. A kid’s goal is to get good marks. How you do it? They don’t care. Schools allocated zero practical classes to pupils. Syllabus and curriculum are way behind the time. They don’t teach the moral values in higher education thinking students are matured, and environmental studies are a waste of time. There are few bad practices Telugus adopted already and recapitulating currently which is sowing corrupt seeds right into pupil’s heads from their childhood. Let me give a couple of examples.

1. Seventh-grade public board exams (Copy as You Like)

When I studied my secondary school education in Kodad, for 7th-grade board exams, schools use to allow copying openly even with invigilator writing the answers to bits and blanks on the blackboard. This is because the same school hosts the exams with their personnel as invigilators. If a pupil gets good marks(by copying, who cares), it increases the average score of the school, which gets them more admissions next year. It is a survival trick by one school in the beginning, and all schools in the united Andhra Pradesh state(now Andhra Pradesh + Telangana) started doing the same. They bribe the squad who comes for inspection. This is the first message schools gave to kids that `you can do corruption for some advantage, it is fine`. But they abolished this system after a few years, but the students who went through this are infected, and there is a chance that they apply this principle whenever possible.

2. Intermediate practical exams

The whole world knows what happens here and now you too should. Intermediate is 11, 12th grades in Telugu Academy board’s terminology. There they teach theoretical Chemistry and Physics for students. Board advises colleges to include practical studies/examinations to experience what they have learned that year. These colleges entirely skip teaching practical studies and conduct practical exams just for the sake of awarding free marks to their students. It is like stabbing your eye with a knife by yourself. This process is happening still in Telugu states right at this moment. They introduced a new jumbling system(exam center shuffle), and colleges corrupted the system by coming to a mutual understanding.

If a system corrupts its students, they don’t do anything different when it is their turn.

There are many such cases where Parents + much-unqualified public/private teachers + Education System all collectively spoiled their kids who later try to apply corruption in all aspects of life.

Children learn from their parents. If a father drives his motorbike without a helmet or goes in the wrong direction, the kid tries to see and follow that. She thinks the traffic lessons in her social studies are utter plain garbage and exists only for obtaining marks. Coming to education and entrepreneurial standards in India, see here an editorial recently published in a prominent Telugu newspaper. It mainly says India lacks skills that the modern world needs.