Man Suddenly Changes his Views on Telangana

HYDERABAD: A local man suddenly changed his stand on the creation of a separate state of Telangana.

“This is a democracy, and if citizens choose to create a new state, so be it”, said Umesh Reddy, 32, who inherited 8.4 acres of land in Visakhapatnam when his uncle passed away last week. “We should be sensitive to the needs of others”, he continued, taking a complete U-turn from his earlier stand that a new state would “screw things up” and that “people would think I’m some villager if I say I’m from Telangana”.

“I was initially pretty apprehensive, but on deeper thought, I realised that splitting the state would benefit the country”, said the recently laid off man, whose newly inherited land is likely to double in value when Visakhapatnam becomes the new capital of Andhra Pradesh if the state is split.

We contacted one of his friends, who said, “Umesh was staunchly against the creation of Telangana. Why, just the day before yesterday, he rallied all of us to join him in some protest march against K.Chandrasekhara Rao. He also set up a blog called United Andhra. And the very next day, I see him on TV, shouting slogans against the Congress Party, burning effigies and what not.”

The confused friend continued, “It gets weirder. I opened my inbox this morning to see an invitation to subscribe to his new blog, Telangana4progress. He actually went to the extent of advertising this blog on Rediff. I was confused and when I called him, he said that he had a ‘moment of clarity’, and that he wants to ‘fight’ for the people of Telangana. He also chided me for ‘being selfish’ when I told him that I still supported a unified state.”

As of press time, Mr. Reddy was frantically deleting his old blog entries, one of which was titled “Only jobless child molesters support Telangana!”

(Contributed by Sirka Pyaaz)