Gowtham Bharadwaj was in a car from Marakkanam to Chennai a couple of weeks ago when the calls started to pour in. He had an office call to attend at that time — Gowtham is a Chartered Accountant by profession — but he kept getting calls on his second line.
He didn’t understand why at first. And then, he logged on to Whatsapp and noticed the many notifications he had got; his ‘Nee Neeli Kannullona’ (‘Aagaasa Veedu Kattum’ in Tamil) from Dear Comrade had released, and was slowly becoming widely shared.
By the time he first heard it himself, it had got over three lakh views. By that night, the song, composed by Justin Prabhakaran, which Gowtham has sung in all four south Indian languages, had become a rage. That’s when it slowly sunk in for Gowtham. “The response has been totally unexpected. This is all that I’ve wanted in life; I did not get it in the past when I craved for it. But I’m very happy it fell in place now,” he says.
He has been associated with many music composers and has sung tracks in the past few years, but ‘Nee Neeli’ has given him the big launchpad that many singers dream of. But Gowtham is grounded. “I’m not expecting some ten song offers immediately, but I’m happy that the doors have opened,” he says, “Many singers and composers from Hyderabad have shown interest in the song and told me that it sounds fresh. For me, it’s like any other simple AR Rahman song from the 90s, but perhaps there was some magic in it for today’s audiences. Of course, Vijay Deverakonda’s star factor helped a lot.”
Gautham has sung four versions of the song — in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. “Justin himself recorded for all languages, though they will be dubbed versions only. We put in a lot of effort in all the versions, with leading lyricists contributing their lines,” he says.
Though Gautham recorded for ‘Nee Neeli Kannullona’ in all four languages, he did not tell anyone because he was unsure if it would make it to the film. Gautham’s experience with the film industry has been not-so-sweet; either he was used only in tracks or he’d be part of a four-singer number in which you could not hear him separately. In fact, he was one of the choices for singing the ‘Adiye Azhage’ number for Justin Prabhakaran. “But I think the director preferred a more rustic voice and they recorded with Sean Roldan,” he says. The song went on become a huge hit. “I think destiny had other plans for me and it fell in place with ‘Nee Neeli’,” he laughs.