Just listening to Music the entire day would keep her charged up even after midnight. This she says is the "secret of her energy". Any Artiste, she says, will experience this energy generated after sadhane (practice).

Even to this day Neela maami feels the need to render a fresh keertane or a new concept of a raagam at a kacheri to keep her craft from stagnating.

Since the fundamentals of Shastriya Sangeeta are universally unchanging across the globe, it is easy for Artistes to perform together at a kacheri without prior association.

 All accompaniments are bound by onde paatha - one training, whether it is the violin, mridangam or ghatam performers, as long as they are able to adjust to the focal Artiste- the vocalist.

An important aspect for Neela maami is to maintain eye contact with the audience for most part of the keertane, if not during the raga that precedes it and requires much concentration. Distractions arise for the Artiste when members in the audience are not equally involved in listening, she says.

The scope of Carnatic music can be stretched up to its ellai (limits)- the larger framework of the shastras. However, fusion of Carnatic music with say, a Western piece, is like one river crossing another, according to Neela maami, while Hindustani music can still be imbibed simultaneously with the Carnatic format since they both report to a common shruti.

The performance during a kacheri carries energy right from the Artistes down to the audience - better the execution of the ragas, more will be the energy absorbed by the listener. 

In her limited spare time, she enjoys writing articles about Music and hopes to someday achieve a name in the field of Writing.

When we asked Neela maami to describe her journey of eighty-three years to us, she said with her natural stoic and effortless precision, “My life is very flowery”.

A word on the edit: We were introduced to Neela Ramgopal via her performance on stage at Gayana Samaja and were spellbound by her technique and energy. The challenge was – how do we showcase the performer without revealing the performance? This was a choice because we believed that one must attend a live concert for a fair experience of an Artiste’s musical expression rather than watching it on a two-dimensional plane, the screen.

We decided to use the music we recorded at Gayana Samaja as a foundation that would support her voice narration as well as the visuals. Neela maami’s narration became a sequential timeline of events, and the visuals a non-linear interpretation of the present day, captured across multiple visits. 

These music clips (along with the corresponding visuals) of the performance eventually became an important layer representing the drama of her vocation, 

while shots of her activities at home are more intimate and real – be it her tutelage or other household tasks. Most visuals of maami in solitude have been further slowed down to add depth and stillness.

Another play of visuals was through the perspective of a student, which initially made to represent maami's childhood while she talks of it (as a series of parallel events), reveals towards the end what Neela maami is best known for - imparting decades of precious experience to the next generation.

The finale shot is as per the format we have followed through the Visage series, but with an added physical complexity around the tracking axis this time around - sometimes, small challenges when overcome give great joy! It helped that our muse and those connected with her were fully in support of our cause. Here is what happened behind the scenes:

Music is undoubtedly a vital tool in visual communication. At first, we thought we were ready when we decided to use Neela maami’s performance as the background score for the film, since it also enhanced our muse’s story. Hence, the live music clip has been used as a tool to represent a graph of emotions, and to showcase the various performers that come together to create an experience.

However, we were actually opening a can of worms:

We had not recorded the entire performance as video – we only had bits as usable and dynamic footage.  Which meant that we could not pick necessarily the best parts of the music but had to choose audio corresponding to the better visuals.

We needed to be careful while overlapping this performance music (especially where her singing is heard), with the narrating voice of maami’s- to see her singing while hearing her speaking would be odd.

The next point should really have been a disclaimer, especially to purists. We are conscious about the fact that Carnatic music is a reserved and conservative Artform and cannot just be used in an audio-visual medium as pleased. Having said that, we do not proclaim that the background score is not a result of some direction and reorder. It is of course, far from being a single piece as performed on the day, but it isn’t – we believe – an insensitive manipulation to suit an ulterior purpose. There has been no enhancement or mixing enforced on any of the original audio clips. The music bits have been sequenced in order to achieve a build-up: starting from a warm up, to a gradual rise and a peaking finale - all in view of representing a veteran's life in under five minutes!