They successfully rallied tens of thousands of students into travelling to the campus at short notice, but the people on the stage at the Osmania Arts College this evening should have focused more on the movement at hand rather than on personal glory.
Featuring a disorganized and overcrowded stage marred by visible struggle for credit and airtime on stage, the
Telangana Vidyarthi Mahagarjana at Osmania University this evening appeared several times more as a showcase of assorted people seeking their place in the limelight than as a dedicated group of student leaders driven by an all-encompassing cause.
There were 2 vertical tiers in the stage, and as you'll see in the photos and videos, over 50 people crowded and frequently jostling on each, especially the top one. And the 2-hour window allowed by the AP High Court was used by close to 20 speakers - in addition to folk programs.
Listening to 20 speakers saying the same things, when very few of them are established leaders of stature that people
want to hear - the recognized leaders were all banned by the HC from this meeting - can backfire. Added to that, most of the speakers had hardly any oratorical skills, or even language skills, as visible by the frequent stuttering in the effort to find the right word.
Now given that the competition for air-time was high, if you paused, you would have the mike taken away, and so most speeches were filled with banalities - overcoming the lack of imagination by saying things everyone else is saying, and playing to the gallery through lines laced with venom against people and parties opposed to separate statehood.
Some of the internal squabbling on stage could be heard all over thanks to the public address systems - especially freedom fighter 95-year-old Konda Lakshman Bapuji asking people around him to let him talk, after he was given the mike.
Indeed, what they were saying on stage seemed to be getting overshadowed many times by the visible clamour, in front of national media and thousands in the audience, for internal supremacy among those on the stage. There was no clear chain of command, and it looked like any pecking order was getting established on the stage, by who could get the microphone for the longest time.
They can only hope that the media will gloss over their human frialities.