Starting from the title, there has been a rich Telangana flavour in all the promotional videos of Puri Jagannadh’s upcoming film iSmart Shankar. Especially, Ram’s dialogues in the two trailers were heavily loaded with Hyderabadi Deccani dialect. Of course, there is also a section of critics who find this artificial.
While those hailing from Hyderabad and Telangana may find connected to the language in iSmart Shankar, there are serious doubts about whether the Andhra audience will understand the dialogues. In a latest interview, Puri Jagannadh has revealed an interesting incident that happened recently between him and a distributor from Vizag.
Puri said that the distributor had called him and told him that Andhra people will not connect to dialogues like “maar muntha…chod chintha” and thus iSmart Shankar will not make good money in the Andhra region. “I was surprised. Aren’t Telangana people watching the movies with Andhra dialogues over these years? Then why can’t Andhra people understand Telangana dialogues? I later realised that the distributor spoke like that only to acquire iSmart Shankar’s Uttarandhra rights for a lesser price,” Puri said.
Puri went on to say that 80% of Vizagites don’t understand Hindi, but still watch Bollywood movies. “I watched a Chinese action film in Vizag nearly 40 years ago. Although I didn’t understand the language, I could connect to it,” Puri added. He further exuded confidence and said that Andhra people will surely like iSmart Shankar.
