A R Rahman Online Website Beta

“Come on Dileep. We’re waiting for you. There’s some problem in the synthesizers you brought. Could you please look on to it?” asks Arjunan master to Dileep. Dileep starts to work upon the problem in the synthesizer by dismantling the parts in a classy way. After some moments, it’s working fine. Arjunan master hugs Dileep and says “You’re a brilliant boy”

Tears roll down from Dileep’s eyes, so does Arjunan master on seeing him and asks “Dileep, thinking of dad? What to do? It’s fate, this isn’t the age for him to pass away from all of us. It feels that your father is still with us”. Arjunan master gives some money to Dileep, it’s for letting the music instruments like Univox, Claviolin.

With that money Dileep buys chocolates and biscuits for his sisters and comes home. Gives the remaining money to his mother. On seeing him, his mother moves and wonders “In this small age he carries the family on his shoulders. On a studying age, I send him to recording studios”, worries Dileep’s mother. But on seeing the visionary eyes of Dileep, she understood that her son goes in the right path.

Dileep isn’t jovial at home. His world is all about the musical instruments. His favorite game is to dismantle the parts of musical instruments and join them again in his room. He has no other time pass such as cinema, playing cricket other than music.

Dileep enters his room and starts playing a tune in the harmonium. That’s Bethlahamil Raavil, composed by his father. On hearing her son playing that tune, she thinks as if her husband is back. Added to that, little Dileep does some modification to that tune and plays it, hearing it takes her to another world. At once, she comes and hugs her beloved son, shedding happy tears.

Writing about Allah Rakha Rahman requires one to be a hound rather than a fox, a sleuth rather than an artist. And yes, it requires the patience of a saint to wait for hours at his Kodambakkam home along with directors, producers, wannabe singers and his large and ever-growing staff. The genius, when he appears, is chatty, cheery and charming enough. But he is not given to revealing too much about himself, whether it is about his faith or the way he works.

The best way to get to know him is to speak around him, which is exactly what Kamini Mathai has done. So yes A.R. Rahman: The Musical Storm may look like a quickie and even smell like a hard-headed business move rather than a long-nurtured editorial decision but it is still enlightening about one of India’s most private public figures, who began by earning Rs 50 as a record player operator and can now put any figure on desperately preferred bank cheques.

What it is rich in is a lot of trivia for Rahmaniacs. Of how he was about to go to the Berkeley School of Music before Mani Ratnam offered him Roja or how he made Subhash Ghai stay up for 58 nights in a row while working on Taal or how he once dyed his ponytail red or even how the K.M. in his K.M. Music Conservatory stands for a 16th century Sufi saint, Khalishah Mastan, who had the same name as Rahman’s mother’s guru, Kareemullah Shah Qadri.

His visit to Middlesex University in Hendon, London had two purposes. Along with Middlesex’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Driscoll, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding between his KM Music conservatory in Chennai, India and the University. AR, as he is known, was also awarded an Honorary Degree, making him a Doctor of Middlesex University, the highest honor the University can bestow.

Middlesex is an extremely popular British university throughout India and hundreds of Indian students come to study on its London campuses. When the word got out that their musical hero, AR Rahman, was coming to receive his honorary degree, excitement started to mount. When he arrived on campus, there were scenes reminiscent of Beatlemania; women screamed and men mobbed him for an autograph or just a glance in their direction!