June 09, 2026
సోది — ep. 1
two states, one very long pattern
Every Telugu person I have ever met in an engineering college had the same answer when asked why they picked their branch. "Good scope." Scope meaning jobs. Jobs meaning a number at the end of the month that could be converted into something a family could talk about at weddings. Nobody picked ECE because circuits fascinated them. Nobody picked CSE because they had been writing code since they were fifteen. The branch was a vehicle and the vehicle needed to go abroad, and that was the entire plan.
So the plan plays out. Tier-3 engineering degree, a few months at a local consultancy that teaches talking about things never actually built, a resume that grows not because anything was done but because someone inflated it, then a visa application, then a desi consulting firm in the US that places the person at a client site while taking a significant cut of whatever the client pays. The worker ends up making maybe half of what the client is actually billing, but it converts well in rupees so nobody complains loudly.
In early 2026, a journalist in Dallas went to the office addresses listed on H1B applications from Telugu-run IT consulting firms and found, at address after address, a house. Sometimes the person inside refused to open the door. These firms had filed anywhere from 12 to 23 visa applications while operating out of residential addresses with nothing resembling a business. Further upstream, consulting firms have been caught preparing entirely fake resumes — 7-plus years of fabricated experience for people with none. Proxy interviews where someone else takes the technical round on the actual candidate's behalf are documented and common. The person gets the job, cannot do it, and the cycle continues because the point was never the work.
And the person who ran this exact pipeline turns around and tells every junior considering a tier-3 college: don't come here, bad placements, you won't get a job if you're not talented. Said by someone who attended the same college they are warning against, who inflated a resume to get abroad, who has not written a line of code they understand. The self-awareness just does not exist, because at no point in this process did anyone stop to ask what they were actually doing or why.
That absence — of curiosity, of questioning, of caring about anything beyond the immediate transaction — follows the community everywhere it goes. There are 1.2 million Telugu people in the United States, enough to constitute something meaningful if the interest was there. A professor invited to a TANA meeting in 2013 described it as purely an entertainment event, where he was not given five minutes to speak. The same organisations that mobilise thousands for a Tollywood film release have nothing to say about anything happening in the country they actually live in.
Telugu NRIs flew in from the Gulf and the US to campaign in the 2023 Telangana elections, funded social media operations, spent real money and time — on the politics of a state they left, for parties that see them as ATMs, and then felt betrayed when they received nothing in return. The countries that gave them the visa and the job get road rallies blocking traffic for film releases and viral footage that the entire Indian diaspora then has to deal with.
It connects to something even more surface level, which is that there is a specific Telugu guy who has decided that looking like a decision was made before leaving the house is not required. This sounds petty but it is the same thing — a complete absence of consideration for how things appear from outside the self. The NTR statue installed in Atlanta in 2024, a Telugu film icon and Andhra Pradesh politician with zero meaning to anyone outside the community, went viral for generating anti-India rhetoric. Posts calling for deportation. The community was outraged. Whether installing a regional political figure's statue in an American city was a coherent idea to begin with was not a question anyone seriously asked. The point was to exist loudly, not to communicate.
Back home, this same logic applied to women looks like: in East Godavari, 10 people arrested for organising a nude dance at a Poleruamma Jatara in Uppangala village. In Chittoor, youth allegedly forced women to perform semi-nude dances to film songs at a Vinayaka Navratri mandapam. Reported regularly enough that it is a pattern, not a series of incidents — women hired or coerced to perform at nominally religious or cultural events, in front of crowds, with cameras running. A village in West Godavari banned women from wearing nightgowns during the day, announced by drumbeat, fined if caught, reward offered to anyone who reported a violation. The women said they would not disobey. This is coastal Andhra in living memory.
The sons of this society are the ones in Dallas running the fake consultancy, in Atlanta putting up the statue, in the US complaining about colleges they went to. The geography changes. The underlying indifference to whether anything being done is worth doing does not.
Two states, both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, one very long pattern.