Meet Arjun Reddy’s female alter ego, Aruna Reddy

If director Sandeep Reddy Vanga ever wants to remake Arjun Reddy with a female protagonist, he needs to look no further than Prathyusha M. This Hyderabad girl shot into social media reckoning with Aruna Reddy, the three-and-a-half-minute parody of the teaser of the Vijay Devarakonda-starrer. Despite releasing a good eight months after the original teaser that took the Internet by storm, Aruna Reddy has created quite a flutter both online and off it.
Prathyusha confesses she’s a big fan of Vijay Devarakonda. She even traces her roots to the very town in Nalgonda district — Devarakonda —that Vijay derives his last name from. “Maadibhi Devarakonde,” declares Prathyusha, who seems like a real-life version of Arjun Reddy. “Pucca Telangana pori nenu, endi ante maaku chaala guts untayi, simple ga cheppalante nenu evvariki ina,” she says, describing herself.
From smoking up and snorting in gay abandon, to even grabbing a guy by the waist, like how Vijay does in that controversial scene in which he tries to force himself on a girl, letting her go only after her boyfriend barges into the lab, Prathyusha does it all. While the scene in the spoof doesn’t quite end they way it does in the film — with Vijay putting ice-cubes in his underwear to cool off — the girl sure made no bones about channelling her inner alpha female on screen.
“We even shot a kissing scene but decided to take it out on the editing table fearing backlash,” says Vinay Kuyya, who who co-directed the film along with Gopal Chauhan, besides writing the script. “This is my 50th short film. I love to make bold films and the idea to make Aruna Reddy came out of the blue during a conversation with a friend. We shot it and released it online in a couple of days,” explains Vinay, adding, “Over 60 per cent of the messages we got were negative and I blocked a lot of them as they were offensive, targeting Prathyusha.”
Prathyusha seems to be unaffected by the barrage of hate mail. “Pilla bold ga, cigarette thagi, ganja kodithe enduku nachhutadi, evvariki nachhadu, nachhakarledu kuda. I love acting and naku nachhindi nenu chestha,” she says, adding, “Even my mum chided me saying ammayi ayyiundi ilanti panulu chesthava ani. But when I explained that it was just a role, she understood. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone else.”
Admittedly, the spoof is intended to be a love letter of sorts to Vijay. “I love Vijay Devarakonda. It takes guts to do a film like Arjun Reddy. Through this video I want to show that girls can also be bold and strong,” says Prathyusha.
“I just hope Vijay sees the short. I’ve tried to reach him and shared the video on his official social media accounts asking him to see it and share it if he likes it. But he hasn’t
responded yet,” says Vinay.