A Hyderabad native, Gautam has been a Bombay based writer/director since his return to India 14 years ago from NYC. With a couple of Masters degrees, in Communication from the University of Hyderabad and Television-Radio- Film from Syracuse University, he worked as a producer for three and half years at the music TV station Channel[V] during the height of its influence. As an independent since 2000, he works in Broadcast Design, Promotion & Brand Identity as well as in non-fiction TV shows & documentary. Contributing off and on to a few publications, post-colonial India and its strange cities is a primary interest of his, amongst several unrelated, excursionary ones. Email: [email protected]
by Gautam Pemmaraju A month or so ago, at a dinner party, my ears locked into a conversation between two men from a reasonable distance away. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres were still being served; glasses clinked in cheering, and the chinaware made all sorts of bright, transient sounds as they were picked up, put down,…
by Gautam Pemmaraju In a desultory speculative history, an affliction caused by the febrile May heat here in Bombay, I imagined a current day encounter between two old scheming radicals who spent their entire lifetimes up to no good—from global-trotting revolutionary activity to cloistered tomfoolery. I saw MN Roy, a founder of the Communist Party…
by Gautam Pemmaraju Auron par hasney ka anjaam jo hoga so hoga; Lekin voh qaum nahin miththi jo apney aap par hansti hai. The consequences of laughing at others will be what they are. But the people who laugh at themselves will never be erased. Last week, at a screening of my documentary film (a…
by Gautam Pemmaraju The Bombay monsoon has finally fallen into character, after a destitute June. As I was falling asleep to the sound of heavy rain a few nights ago, my attention was once again momentarily drawn to the dense ecology of sounds that the droplets made as they struck several surfaces. There was the…
by Gautam Pemmaraju Legend has it that Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the medieval Bahmani sultan of Bijapur, styled as jagadguru badshah (master of the world) and author of the famed treatise on classical music in Dakhani, kitab-i-nauras, advised Hindu litigants to go to Paithan in the Marathwada area of upper Maharashtra to have their disputes…
Save locus voci resonat conclusus (How sweetly the enclosed space responds to the voice) —Horace, Satires I, iv, 76
by Gautam Pemmaraju Haram aur dayr key jhagdey, kahan tak koi suljhayey Jisey har tarah fursath ho, voh is maidaan mey aayey. (Till when can we unravel what is sacred, what is profane? He, who has nothing else to do, let him enter that battlefield.) —Habib Painter Qawal Over twenty years ago, if memory serves…
by Gautam Pemmaraju Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me The Carriage held but just Ourselves And Immortality. – Emily Dickenson The wise emperor of Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterful Memoirs Of Hadrian, says to his successor Marcus Aurelius that his frail, diseased body is fast approaching its demise. It is the…
by Gautam Pemmaraju Aib na Rakhe Hindi bola Maine to chak dekhe khola Hindi bola kiya bakhan Je gur Prasad tha muje gyan. [Don't think bad if I speak in Hindi, What I experience I speak openly In Hindi I have preached in detail All the wisdom from my teacher's blessing] – From Burhan ‘al…
by Gautam Pemmaraju The relatively impoverished landscape of Zaheerabad, in rural Telangana in central India, transforms as we approach Humnabad town of northern Karnataka. Lush, verdant pastures straddle each side of the highway, and the pregnant monsoon air animated by a fey, impish wind, forces our brief stop into a leisurely meditation. This pleasing landscape…
by Gautam Pemmaraju It is that time of year in Bombay when the city collectively awaits relief from the heat and humidity of the summer months. “The creature of grandeur and complexity that defies comparison with anything” (see here) is but round the corner, and if recent newspaper reports are to believed, relief from the…
by Gautam Pemmaraju If you have ever been set the peculiar task of imagining and creating the sound for ‘Alien Pod Embryo Expulsion' and found yourself at a loss, not to worry, a quick web search will provide an answer. One of the suggestions on this excellent resource is to use canned dog food, or…
by Gautam Pemmaraju If you talk a language they are familiar with you’ll communicate quickly. But in artistic matters ease of communication tends to link itself with lightness of worth. Significant depth often involves a new language. – Terence Dwyer This January saw the passing of Stefan Kudelski, the inventor of the Nagra portable magnetic…
by Gautam Pemmaraju The world about us is a set of ends to be reached or avoided, and the spatiotemporal distance of the ends is organized in perception as the means by which these ends may be so reached or avoided. – George Mead in The Philosophy of the Act Eadward Muybridge’s pioneering experiment Sally…
In a recent critique of Pankaj Mishra’s book The Ruins Of Empire, David Shulman points out interestingly, that in attempting to articulate a composite notion of Asian modernity (and thereby resistance to the West), to configure modernity in context with attendant modernizing processes, negotiations, and ‘modern’ ideas, one must take note of pre-colonial times wherein, as Velcheru Narayana Rao has argued for South India, there are intriguing, ‘organic’, ‘forms of awareness’ that are to be found in Telugu and Tamil speaking regions towards the end of the fifteenth century.
by Gautam Pemmaraju I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses. —Arthur Honegger The influential electronic music artists Kraftwerk, saw their 1977 concept album Trans-Europe Express as a symbol of a unified Europe, a “sonic poem” enabling a moving away from…
by Gautam Pemmaraju In Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterful Memoirs Of Hadrain, a “valediction to a world that has pleased him” written as a letter to the 17 year old Marcus Aurelius, the dying Roman emperor imagines parts of his life to be like “dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy…
by Gautam Pemmaraju Over two weeks ago, on August 11, a sizeable gathering of over 15,000 gathered at Azad Maidan, a public ground in Mumbai, to protest violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar/Burma and those of the northeastern Indian state of Assam. It was in early to mid July that violence broke out between sections…
He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.
by Gautam Pemmaraju “Mudder ho gaya” (there’s been a murder), announces the young man who has hitched a ride with us at Langar Hauz, from the back seat of the car. “Four men chopped some guy down with swords. Just earlier. On the street. Everyone was watching”, he continues on in the typically idiosyncratic local…