With five of his novels being republished this month, well known Telugu author and former Press Chief of the U.S. Consulate in Chennai, Maganti Koteswara Rao talks about how he balanced fiction writing and his career in public relations.
In the Telugu literary world, he is simply known as “Maganti.” He has authored seven best-selling novels in Telugu, several plays, short-stories and poems. His novels have been translated into Tamil and Kannada. He was a journalist in leading Telugu dailies for 10 years from 1975. He began his career in journalism in the Eenadu group under the tutelage of Ramoji Rao. He was a newscaster for ETV from its studio in Chennai for about two years when the ETV was launched. He knows well leaders in politics, films, government, business and media and they include former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. Maganti is an old friend of film actor Chiranjeevi and knows Chiranjeevi's brothers Nagababu and Pavan Kalyan from their younger days. Maganti acted as an official interpreter to U.S. President George W. Bush when Bush visited the Agricultural University in Hyderabad in March 2006. The then Chief Minister Rajasekhara Reddy and Maganti even rehearsed the event the previous day with a U.S. official “acting” as President Bush!
But there is another side to Maganti Koteswara Rao. He served the U.S. Consulate in Chennai for 25 years before opting for voluntary retirement on July 23, 2010 at the age of 55. He joined the U.S. Consulate as Media Editor for Andhra Pradesh and rose to become its Press and Media Chief for south India. After a gap of five years, he is all set now, as he said, to take to the technology of fiction-writing again.
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