NEWSMAKER: A R Rahman

India's Mozart

Allah Rakha Rahman has put India on the global entertainment map. He has just won the Golden Globe in the best original score category for Slumdog Millionaire. And, in spite of his calm demeanour, finds it hard to digest that he actually won the award. The truth is that the Golden Globe has for the first time come to India. It is the second most prestigious award in filmdom after the Oscars.

The award clearly establishes that Rahman, 42, has been accepted globally. The musician, who began playing instruments when he was as young as four, has been contributing to his brand of music to listeners and audiences abroad. He has done musicals for Broadway productions including Bombay Dreams and Lord of the Rings, has composed music for Nokia and scored hit singles like Pray For Me, Brother for the UN and One Love, a tribute to the Taj Mahal. Rahman has experimented not just with his music, but also the manner in which it should be heard.

An extremely shy person, Rahman’s a treat to interview if he’s in the right mood. He even broke into a song when this reporter had interviewed him for an article earlier. He’s known as an impossibly hard task master who, if rumours are to be believed, once drove singer Sonu Nigam to tears during the recording of a song for the Hindi film, Dil Se.

Mohit Chauhan, described “a promising voice” by the maestro himself, says Rahman is “calm, poised, dignified and extremely excited about each and every song that he composes.” And just what’s his working style? “I treat every song as a winner. Every song that gets out from my studio has to be a hit. I always work with that attitude,” he had told Business Standard in an earlier interview.

Rahman (born AS Dileep Kumar in Chennai) started composing for South Indian films at a young age after his father died. His school days also saw him part of a rock band called Roots. From there, he began to compose music independently and was initially criticised for creating and mixing sounds on his computer through different music software. That others followed to make music through software is a different matter altogether.

His new effort, KM Music Conservatory, a school which promises to unearth new talent in the field of music, has been a success story already and Rahman has, predictably, been excited about it. For someone who didn’t have any formal education in music (“I started out because somewhere I had to,” he says), Rahman’s been at the helm of creating careers. From Delhi-based singer Neeti Mohan, to Naresh Iyer and Tanvi Shah, Rahman’s always used voices that he says, “have tried to understand my music”.

Slumdog Millionaire’s musical score, on the face of it, isn’t anything different from what Rahman has attempted earlier. Alka Yagnik’s Ringa Ringa can sheepishly remind you of the old song Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai from Khalnayak. There’s Jai Ho, which is an excellent rendition by the immensely talented Sukhwinder Singh. Rehman himself has done a wonderful rendition of a song titled O Saaya.