This note looks at how Indians—particularly rural Telugu people—greet one another on different occasions.
Let me start with a lighter story. The Greeks have their “Opa,” the French say “Salut,” the English raise a “cheers.” Ask an Indian, and many Hindi speakers will shrug and say “kuch nai”—meaning “nothing like that.” Ironically, some Indians abroad now toss “kuch nai” around as if it were their own “cheers.” A clever businessman even launched a blended whisky under that name. While the branding is amusing, it also highlights how odd this feels in the Indian context. For decades, drinking carried a deep taboo; social drinking barely existed among the middle class. Today, the pendulum has swung the other way—drinking has not just become acceptable, it’s often excessive, and mostly hard liquor aimed at getting wasted. For the record, “cheers” is the standard toast in India too, but never really a homegrown greeting.
As children, we were trained to stand up and say “Good morning teacher” whenever a teacher entered. The phrase, being foreign, often came out mangled—“good morning seather” or “guddu morneen.” Beyond the classroom, though, “good morning” was alien to everyday greetings. My grandmother, a career teacher herself, would proudly prod me to greet her colleagues with “good morning” to show off my English, but that was strictly for show. In daily life, no one actually used it.
The Indian equivalent, “Namaskar,” wasn’t taught in schools either; it came from watching elders. Even then, it was reserved for highly formal occasions, often when welcoming an important stranger. The more natural Telugu welcome was “randi randi”—the equivalent of “aayiye” in Hindi. My Hindi-speaking friends might chuckle, but for Telugus it was the standard respectful invitation. Interestingly, “hello” had no true counterpart. Among my uneducated relatives, “dandalu” (folded hands with a verbal bow) was more common. But “dandalu” carried a power dynamic—something said from lower to higher status, never among equals.
So what did ordinary folk actually say?
For leave-taking, the equivalent of “goodbye” was “veltunnanu” (“I’m going”). Yet we were corrected to say “vellostanu” (“I will go and return”), because it was considered ominous to declare a departure without promising return. A superstition reinforced this: when someone set out on an important errand, a married/young unmarried woman had to walk past them in the opposite direction as a good omen, while a widow’s presence was considered unlucky. Such practices, thankfully, have faded.
Daily greetings were far more colorful than any formal good morning or namaskar. My grandmother, who drilled formal etiquette into her students, never used it herself. Instead, she greeted through sly, practical conversation-starters—asking someone the price of onions if they carried groceries, inquiring about the river’s water level, or whether the day’s lone bus had passed. None of it directly affected her, but it broke the ice and got people talking.
Other greetings were more personal, even nosy. Women often greeted each other by asking what was cooked or planned for lunch—a question that could spiral into a long chat. Some greetings masked social questions: “When will you serve dal-rice?” really meant, “When will your daughter marry?” (since dal-rice with pumpkin curry was mandatory at weddings). A new bride’s status was probed by asking, “Is she pouring water on herself?”—a cryptic way of hinting at pregnancy. More intrusive still was the question of whether a teenage girl “sat on the mat”—a euphemism for menstruation. Families sometimes announced a girl’s first cycle with a village feast, showcasing jewelry and wealth in the process.
Looking back, the greetings of my childhood rural community were far warmer—and sometimes cheekier—than the stiff hello, good morning, or namaskar. They were rooted in curiosity, shared life, and social codes. Experiencing it in person was far richer than anything I can describe. The spoken tongue of coastal Andhra carried a natural, lilting melody. Even quarrels between neighbors sounded musical. Now imagine that same cadence in a warm greeting between two affectionate people—it often felt as if the entire emotional range of music had simply borrowed from those endearing exchanges.
Perhaps as we revive forgotten traditions, it’s worth remembering that these everyday, informal exchanges carried a kind of charm that formal greetings can never quite match.