19-year-old Gokul Krishna’s “Neram” opens with a line from the Bhagavad Gita: the soul is never born and never dies, unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. It is a fitting place to begin a film about belief, even though the video spends the next several minutes working against that certainty.
Structured across three chapters, “Neram” moves backwards through time. The further back it goes, the more intact belief becomes.
Photo: Saina Music Indie
The first chapter, “Bhaavikalam: A God Without Witnesses,” takes place after humanity has disappeared. God remains, but there is nobody left to believe in him. Was he always a god, or did people believing in him make him one? Without witnesses, the question doesn’t really have an answer.
The second chapter, “Varthamanakaalam: The Survivors and the Believers,” brings us back to a recognisable world. A group dressed as deities, Ravana among them, sit around a countryside shop. Nobody performs holiness. They simply exist - people who happen to be dressed as gods, in a world that’s grown used to having them around.
Only then does the film go further back. “Bhoothakaalam: The Chosen One” takes place around a fire, with a group of tribal figures gathered together. One man is singled out by a trail of fire before disappearing in a flash of light, while the others watch. No costumes or rituals yet, only the event, and the people who witness it.
Watched in this order, “Neram” isn’t really tracing the rise and fall of faith. It’s working backward to belief’s rawest form - repetition turning into story, a story into religion, and religion eventually outliving everyone who practised it. By the last chapter, there’s no institution left to hold it up. Something happens, someone sees it, and that’s enough.
Photo: YouTube/Saina Music India
The song itself came together almost by accident. “Neram started with absolutely no grand plans, just us heading into the studio for a guitar recording,” Gokul says. The recording engineer eventually became the co-producer, and what started as a session turned into a larger process of building out the song’s world alongside its video.
Written by Sabarinath K, the track is about someone disappearing without warning, moving from “you faded away not aware of the time going by” towards the hope that “we shall reunite again on a new day.” Produced by Adarsh Narayan and Suraj Nharakkunnath, it pairs electronic elements with a choir, giving its grief a communal quality.
The Bhagavad Gita says the soul is eternal. “Neram” doesn't exactly disagree. It’s just more curious about what happens when the people around it are gone.
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Gokul Krishna
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