We have been back in Hyderabad for just over a week now and the news from the month we missed comes down to two words: Telangana Bandh. I remember the first time I had ever experienced a Hyderabadi strike where the city was closed, or bandh. It was the summer of 2009, and bandhs were relatively new and rare back then. For three days, there was barely an auto or a bus on the road, and people were wary of going out in private vehicles for fear of damages or even danger. We had to buy something one of those days and I remember the outing felt like a spy mission. We planned it all the previous day: an auto driver we had a long relationship with would take us at 6am, and we had to be back by 7am sharp. One of our relatives who owned a shop would sneak into the shop before we got there, we would call as we approached and they would open the metal grate to about 3 feet, and we had to duck in. Any number of things could and did happen to shop owners and auto drivers that didn’t respect the bandh, and everyone was discreet accordingly. Now, two years later, we are living in a Hyderabad that has multiple bandhs a week. And no one really cares anymore, neither normal citizens or activists – Hyderabadis continue living their lives and there is only the occasional story of a brick thrown at a bus window in the outskirts of the city. For auto drivers and shop owners, the decision to honor a bandh is now less about fear and more about economics, and everyone knows it (student photo story to come.) When an auto bandh was called during the long bus bandh, autos still roamed the streets – they could charge extra. When an auto bandh was called right after buses were running again, they were much more eager to honor it. As far as us TMS fellows are concerned, just like every other jaded Hyderabadi Bandh-ignorer, if the buses are bandh, we take autos and if shops are bandh, we pay extra at the renegade shops. The only thing that we can’t work around, of course, is schools.

We got back to Hyderabad to find out that the city was in the midst of a strike that had begun the day before we left, and that most schools had not run since then. The students had not taken the government exams they were supposed to take, and all of last week, most schools in the city had not been running. In fact, it was only yesterday that the month long bandh was finally lifted, and everyone was gearing up for the return to school. But alas, many activists who had been involved in stopping trains through the city had been arrested that morning, resulting in yet another bandh of protest. So today, Tuesday Oct. 18, is the first day in over a month that the city and its schools have been running completely normally.

As far as we are concerned, the main impact of the bandhs is the lack of continuity and, more pressingly, the difficulty of predicting how many classes we will have and how much we can really finish in that time. What feels even more concerning, however, is the impact it is having on the children. Most obviously, there is the fact that there is such discontinuity in their schooling. As it is, there is a less-than-desired degree of discipline in many government schools in terms of having 8 productive, full classes with a teacher present all day every day. Add the fact that they don’t even regularly have school, and this makes a real difference in how much they learn and how seriously they take their education. It is interesting that one of the major complaints of the Telangana movement is that less investment in education means less ability to get good jobs for people from Telangana (Hyderabad is part of Telangana.) But the means to achieving their ends includes calling all the teachers to strike and forcing the children out of schools.

An incident at one of my schools today shows another way that the struggle for Telangana is affecting the children. The boys of Nallagutta have been eager to bring up Telangana since the beginning of the semester, and when we were brainstorming topics for our photo stories, their very first and strongest instinct was to say “Telangana.” Today, we began our video projects and the topic was supposed to be the Telangana movement. All we had done was make a bubble chart with all the words they thought of when they heard “Telangana,” when the Headmistress walked in and asked us to change our topic. In a meeting after class, she explained that it was too sensitive so it was best not to talk about it. Meanwhile, the boys, it became evident in our ten minutes on the subject, knew nothing about the movement. They were passionate, even quoting sound bites about giving their lives for the Telangana masses, but none of them could name one reason why there was a call for a separate state. In a city where bandhs cause weekly disruption, activists and protesters are highly visible, and passions are running high, these not-so-young 14 year olds know very little about what is happening or why, and no one wants to take the responsibility of telling them. But they are eager to learn and know, and they should be. After all, in a few short years, they will be the university students caught in a whirlwind of protests and it is the education they get now that will differentiate those who make informed, passionate political decisions and those who follow the crowd.