Irvine is home to some of the world’s best universities, colleges and highly rated public schools including the prestigious University of California, Irvine. It is in such soil that ‘Telugu Thota’ (garden) – a sort of gurukul for the children of Telugu families – has been thriving for over a decade. The constant gardener who has sown the seeds and has been tending to the garden single-handed is Vijayawada native, Vidya Tadanki.
Starting with seven students, two of them her own children, in 2002 she has been teaching not just Telugu , but its culture to a great extent. Beginning with one batch a week, today she single-handedly teaches five batches. She has no formal training in teaching Telugu and it was not even her elective in college.
After doing her schooling in Nirmala Convent and graduation in Maris Stella College in Vijayawada, Ms. Vidya did her post graduation in English language in Osmania University and Journalism in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Hyderabad. After completing journalism, she worked as a sub-editor in an English magazine in Kolkata.
In 2000, she moved to California with her husband Venkat and took up a job as an English teacher in San Jose. It was then that she was given rigorous training in teaching English to Spanish children. In 2002 she moved again to Irvine and instead of teaching English, Ms. Vidya decided to teach Telugu to her daughter and son, her brother’s children and a few other kids of Irvine.
The training she underwent at San Jose really helped teaching the children who were completely alien to Telugu language. Nearly 250 children have passed out of Telugu Thota till date.
Teaching them to speak, read and write is the least of Ms Vidya’s concern. Telugu Thota children are taught “slokalu, padyalu (poems), paatalu (songs,), natikalu (Songs) all in proper Telugu language”. Ms Vidya was not a person to tolerate modern Telugu movie songs. “I use song and dance to teach the language, but I cannot tolerate children jumping around to film music. In my performances, they have to sing the song themselves,” she clarified.
‘Dasara paatalu’, ‘Potana padyalu’, ‘Gajendra Moksham’, ‘Rukmini Kalyanam’, ‘Radio Annayya’ plays like Pustakha Mahasabha, Dhruva and Prahaladhudu are study material for the children. Another achievement by Telugu Thota children is the creation and performance of a song on Betsy Ross who created the US flag and Pingali Venkaiah of Andhra Pradesh who created the Indian flag.
Though there is no structured syllabus, the students performed bits from what they studied at an annual day celebration. The children have to take an examination and are given a certificate, she said.
“UNESCO’s definition of a dying language is that the youngest generation not knowing their language. I took up teaching Telugu to my children and others so that this does not happen,” she said.
Ms Vidya belongs to a distinguished family—her grandfather Jandhyala Dakshnamurthy was a chairman of Vijayawada Municipality, her father Shankar was a physician and first directly elected mayor if Vijayawada and her mother Kameswari was a elected municipal corporator.
