Once scared to speak Telugu around grandfather ANR, Akhil Akkineni lands biggest hit Lenin | Telugu News
4 min readHyderabadJul 15, 2026 07:58 PM IST Long before Lenin made him the talk of Telugu cinema, a teenage Akhil Akkineni sat beside his parents Nagarjuna and Amala and his older brother Naga Chaitanya and made a confession that got everyone laughing. He was scared of his grandfather. Not because of any strictness in the traditional sense, but because of the one thing Akkineni Nageswara Rao took very seriously: the Telugu language. “I’m scared of my grandfather because whenever I speak in Telugu, he finds my sentences faulty to the core,” a visibly sheepish Akhil Akkineni said. “I only speak in English with my grandfather, while I speak in Telugu with my family.” The comment drew laughter from the rest of the family, but it also said something quietly significant about the household Akhil grew up in. ANR, who acted in over 255 films across a career that stretched from the 1940s to 2014, was known for his deep respect for the Telugu language and its nuances. He was a man who came from …









