Telanagana-Seemandhra/I Town - II Town and a rally

TELANAGANA–SEEMANDHRA/I TOWN–II TOWN

and a rally

I was born and brought up in a ‘town’ which is reportedly a ‘city’ now, if population is the benchmark for differentiating a city from town. I love my hometown the most wherever I am and who doesn't!

As I grew up and started going to school, the town as I knew it is only the school bus route and nothing else. That is the kind of knowledge a kid would have or was expected to know. Home to school and school to home is all that a town is about for a school going kid. The same was nicely captured as a song in Mahesh Babu’s recent film 1, Ninekkodine.

As we grew to higher classes, our knowledge of the town also improved and it was about old and new. Old literally meant where the town originally came into being and new meaning the upcoming areas. My parents lived in II Town. Old town was called as (one) I Town and new parts of the town are called (Two) II town. Even today the police stations in my home town, sorry city, are named as I Town PS, II Town PS, etc. So would be the case in several towns/cities.

Each town was the fiefdom of a local ‘leader’ who was actually a rowdy element of the particular locality with almost complete control on the ‘law and order’. So you had a I Town leader and another II Town leader competing in elections and rowdy collections during special festivals like Dasara and other festivals from the local traders for erecting pooja pandals. They were expected not to enter each other’s territory. There was a kind of unwritten code. It was heroic if someone from II Town went to I Town and bashed up the opponents and vice versa. Such was the ‘popularity’ of these leaders that they could enter politics out of sheer ‘rowdy’ power. There were several films produced and one of them was I Town Rowdy in which Actor Venkatesh played the lead role.

Occasionally, there were rallies that were taken out by these ‘leaders’ with their henchmen more to show their ‘raw rowdy power’ than anything else. They were not rallies of achievement in any case.

People of the locality used to ‘respect’ the local ‘leader’ more out fear than anything else. As the town started emerging into a city due to expansion, explosion of population, and evolution of media, there is some change in the way such elements controlled the towns. Even today some of our towns and cities are gripped by the same atmosphere. The less said about villages, the better.

Today the we see a similar situation in AP. Seeing the rally being taken by Telengana Rashtra Samiti for projecting KCR, I am reminded of similar rallies that I had seen as a kid that were not based on any individual great achievement but just a show of pompousness and assumed greatness. The difference is only in the scale of the rally.

They say history repeats itself. While merger of I Town and II Town made my home town into a ‘city’ in the years later, is splitting the states into smaller states for vested interests  going to take us back to the old days where one family, one man, ‘hero’-worship and dynasty politics take a front seat leaving the progress in the back seat?

If history has to repeat itself, we would do better by dumping it and starting all over again.