The interview which appears below, was originally published on Rahman Music Sheets in February 2025. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
Delhi 6 is very personal to you. Can you tell us about the film’s concept?
There are like so many wounds in society today – we want Delhi 6 to be like a soothing balm. Delhi 6, the film’s title represents the PIN code for old Delhi, the area around Chandni Chowk and the Red Fort. This is where I grew up. I present this living, breathing city with an absolute passion, capturing its essence and soul through its sights, sounds, smells and expressions.
It’s a very peculiar place, old Delhi, where I grew up. Maybe my brief to Rahman was – you take a left into Chandni Chowk and there is an old Shiva Temple there, 800 years old, and diagonally opposite is a Methodist Church. Next to the church is a cinema which has a poster of the latest blockbuster. Diagonally opposite that is Shish Ganj Gurudwara. Opposite Shish Ganj Gurudwara is the famous old Delhi eatery called Haleem. Just before Haleem is McDonald’s. At the end of the street is the Jama Masjid.
I still remember in the mosque, because growing up in Delhi you have no space, in the afternoon the Imam used to allow us to play cricket inside in the big courtyard, in the fountain area, and he was very happy irrespective of who you are, what religion you come from – the kids were enjoying. Now when you turn around, what do you see? You see the tricolor flying on Red Fort.
That was my conversation with Rahman and I told him I’ve grown up here which is like a melting pot of cultures, but at the drop of a hat the area would shut down when there was this fear of ethnic hatred. So I wanted to capture that.
What kind of discussions did you have with Rahman for capturing Delhi’s character?
Our process has been extremely enjoyable, very exciting, very challenging. More than discussing a song situation with him, I’ve always spoken about the story you want to tell and through the story what we are trying to achieve. It’s not just a film for us, it’s a part of your life you’re living, and this journey – the musical journey which is such a huge part of the film, not just the songs, the background music, the storytelling, the thoughts, the ideas.
One day late at night we are speaking and I’m saying there are like so many wounds in society today – we want Delhi 6 to be like a soothing balm. I think that’s what I heard him say also. So we speak more about people and the pain, we speak more about divisions within divisions which we have in the name of caste, in the name of religion, between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots.
Then he goes into a zone and what his fingers do – what comes out is a song like “Rehna Tu.” He just composed that on the spur of the moment.
How did “Rehna Tu” come together during that conversation?
I started talking about the wounds and how this film should be like a soothing balm on the open wounds, and he kept playing something and listening. We were talking and I was talking about this intolerance about somebody else’s beliefs and religion, and he kept playing and he kept talking and he kept playing. When we had the song, I have no clue when it was ready, when it got composed – it just happened during that conversation. It was not like “wait a minute, I’ve got an idea, let me play this” – none of that.
Tell us about the inclusion of Prasoon Joshi’s handwritten notes in “Rehna Tu.”
Prasoon is such a natural – he was completely in tune with me and what I was trying to say. There was huge intensity in his work. The tune was so beautiful and knowing the thought of the film, he jotted it down and he gave me the pieces of paper. Then Rahman sang it.
Normally I step out of the room when the singer is singing because I want to come back with a fresh ear to feel it, because then you get caught in the process. The song was done, Rahman called me and said it’s done. So fast – like half an hour he finished the song. Amazing, but that was the first draft obviously.
I heard the song and I said, “Hey, where is that? That is my song.” Because there is “when two hands have to hold each other, one is a left hand and one is a right hand” – Prasoon, you’ve written it so well and that’s the line you’ve taken out of your song. That’s what we brought back and told Rahman about it. He said, “Yeah man, that’s like wow, that is the thought,” and how beautifully he sang it.
How did “Arziyan” take shape? That’s quite a unique creation story.
We all bow down to the light above which gives us the energy to live this life, and yet I feel there are so many misgivings in me myself – I’m so incomplete as a person. So I said let’s do a song around that. We would go through the entire album and I would keep repeating my request, and we were calling that song “Main Arziyan” – that I’ve come back home.
I think it was almost after a year or maybe a little more than that, early morning – I distinctively remember it must be around 4:30-5 in the morning and I had fallen asleep on his sofa set in Chennai in the studio – and he woke me up and he said he just had a dream and he got the tune and the tune came in the dream.
He had jammed on the piano for 37 minutes and in that he said there is a tune somewhere here, you want to hear it out? And I somewhere found a refrain. I said, “Was this in your dream?” He said, “Bang on.” And that song became “Arziyan.”
How important is it for directors to share not just scripts but also convictions and fears with composers?
My trust in Rahman was complete – not because he’s going to give me a great song, but as a human being I could be extremely vulnerable with him. I could reveal all my weaknesses but also all my aspirations at the same time. There was never a veil or a mask of a director behind which I was hiding. I could never do that with him and I would never do that with him and I cannot do that with him, because the purity of what I was getting in return only purified me much more.
One could not say “I have this idea and I want to say this, I am the director.” I don’t even know if I’ve ever used the word “I” with him.
Tell us about bringing together Ustad Bismillah Khan and Shreya Ghoshal for the film.
It’s the pre-climax of the film and all the differences which people have – all the relatives and the neighbors and the friends and the relationships are falling apart, including the love story. It’s a very sad moment when relationships which you’ve nurtured for life and you believed in start falling apart, not because you’re feeling so, but because the society says so.
For me, Rahman is like Ustad Bismillah Khan. If Rahman was only into classical and Hindustani or Carnatic classical, it would be like Bismillah Khan, like Alla Uddin Khan, like Ravi Shankar. So it felt correct to bring both the maestros together at the same time.
The female protagonist Bittu in the film, played by Sonam, her life is also going through turmoil and she’s running away from her home, leaving her family and her loved ones, and the whole neighborhood is breaking into this hatred for each other because of communal issues.
Zillions and zillions of people and generations across have not only nurtured and loved but have also been healed by Ustad Bismillah Khan, exactly the way Rahman heals you. So it had to be a healing process. Rahman wanted Shreya to step into those shoes. I remember her rehearsing, I remember her calling her grandmother in Kolkata who had learned from Bismillah Khan to say, “Rahman and Rakesh, these two people have put me in a spot now and I have to deliver it.”
My pet name for Shreya is “Choti.” I don’t call her Shreya – even in my phone book it’s “Choti calling.”
We always talk about our culture, our tradition, the depth of it, the richness of it, and why not, rightly so. But I also feel that we owe it to the generation today to reconnect with the same greatness which we have enjoyed and nurtured and loved. This song was an attempt towards that, and it is one of the songs in Delhi 6 that among all the albums I’ve been part of, always brings tears.
For Rahman, it was his humbleness and his greatness to take an original voice recording from All India Radio of Bismillah Khan with all the scratches in it and just present it like a gift to a generation today.
“Dil Gira Dafatan” is quite unique – how did that collaboration with Ash King work?
That is the genius of Rahman – that he could imagine Ash King singing “Dil Gira Dafatan” which has tongue-twister Urdu words, and Ash doesn’t even know Hindi. It’s only the genius of Rahman who could imagine that, because the texture of blues is what he wanted and that voice he wanted.
Your voice is also an instrument – your voice is not just a voice, it is part of the entire instrumentation. That is the beauty of Rahman’s music – everything hits a spot where what the composition is, what the voice is, the way it’s rendered, the way he arranges it, it becomes a whole.
The voice he wanted was Ash, and Ash didn’t know Hindi. So the recording went on for days and days and days. It could be sometimes one line a day, at times two lines a day. I became a Hindi coach in the process just to get that right.
The thing is, we never insisted that the grammar has to be precise – not just with Ash, with anyone, with the best of the Hindi singers also. That is not the thing. The thing is, is the emotion and the feeling gone through? Rest everything is fine.
I must say, first and foremost, Rahman’s belief in him, his conviction, his genius to see and imagine what we didn’t know. I was wondering how is this going to happen, what’s going on? At best I can teach him a Hindi line a day from the song. And then Ash’s hard work – he put in, he didn’t give up.
Once I had the song, my work began. It gave me sleepless nights. I kept dreaming, thinking about the song, and finally I told Binod the cinematographer and Bharti the co-producer and editor, “Guys, this can only be a dream. It is a dream song. It is so beautiful, every time I listen to it, it takes me to somewhere else.”
Actually, Sonam described it very well after she saw the edit of this song. She said, “Mehra, why did you make the entire film? Your entire film is in this one song” – the moment Abhishek opens the door in Old Delhi and he enters Times Square, and all metaphors get juxtaposed, including King Kong as Kala Bandar, and there is a Ramlila parade going on there, and there are nuns on the street and a cow is giving birth and jalebis are being fried instead of frankfurters. We recreated Times Square inch to inch.
What was Rahman’s reaction when you showed him the “Dil Gira Dafatan” sequence?
I didn’t know whether this was just madness – is it okay, have I done justice to this song? Because I got really obsessed by it. He was the first person to see it. His reaction was – it was nice, it worked out for him also.
I think the genius was in the way he composed the song that kind of inspired the genius in me, because all of us have that quality about us – we can all leap higher than we think we can. So he gave me the wings, so I flew.
Tell us about “Genda Phool” – how did that folk adaptation work?
“Genda Phool” was a thought given to me by Raghubir Yadav. He’s from MP and he’s done a lot of street theater and he knew a lot of folk music. While growing up in Old Delhi, I had heard my aunts, my grandmother, my mother sit on the terrace in cold winter sun making pickles and all that and singing some folk song, some bhajan.
We got this folk melody which Raghubir, whom we call lovingly “Raghu,” recorded in Raghubir’s voice. It turned out beautiful, but the song was still incomplete. It was in its very raw form – a folk song sung by a great voice.
I still remember at Yash Raj Studio in Mumbai, Rahman dropped in and he heard the take and he was very happy with it. He said the song feels good to me as such. I said, “But it feels incomplete. It does not belong to Delhi 6 yet, to our album.” He said, “Yeah.” So I played it again and he started doing something.
It was not just the beginning, not just the chorus – he brought in the whole fusion into the song. It is a lovely example, a pure example of how fusion can take something which is traditional and make it relatable to the generation today, and it turned out to be a classic.
You generally don’t have lip-sync in your films. Why is that approach?
I have grown up on lip-sync songs, but a greater experience for me entering the world of music as a listener was through the radio. I always heard songs, I never saw songs. For me it was not about how a song is choreographed or who is performing it. For me it was always who has composed it, who’s the lyricist, whose voice it is.
These are two different functions. When you consume a song through your eyes, it triggers something else, some other senses. Eyes are the closest to your brain also – it analyzes a lot of things, much more information is given to you to break it down. But when it comes through your ears, at times you shut your eyes also and you imagine it or reimagine it in your own way. When it comes from your ears, I think it goes into your soul, it doesn’t go into your brain.
We don’t have an alternate music scene – our rock stars are film actors. They are stars. The reason they become rock stars is because they’re also singing songs, and we believe that illusion. I completely believe that it is Dev Anand singing and not Kishore Kumar, it is Amitabh Bachchan singing and not Kishore Kumar.
In “Rang De Basanti” and in “Delhi 6” and in “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag,” predominantly the films among the other films I’ve made, there was barely any lip-sync. I’m not averse to lip-sync, but if my character does not allow it, I would like to stay away from it.
How does Rahman’s background score elevate your sequences?
Background music is done after the film is shot and edited. When Rahman scores – and I never call it background music, for me it’s the original soundtrack, the OST, and that’s the approach we have – in my limited experience, he’s among the only modern-day composers who puts more hard work on the OST than just the songs itself. For him, that entire thing is an album, and without fail, every time it elevates the picture.
Delhi 6 received harsh reviews initially. How did that affect you personally?
It gave me a bigger heartbreak than the joy I received from “Rang De Basanti” put together. After the initial weekend when it did record business, from Monday onwards it just tanked and there was this huge outcry against the film.
So yeah, there was heartbreak. I went deep into alcoholism for almost 6 months or something, and I just wanted to sleep and not get up. There was a spasm, there was a gap which I fell into – it was like a black hole.
Then one morning I woke up and I realized I got to do something about it, can’t just get into a depressed mode with it. So I called up cinematographer Binod Pradhan and I told him, “Binod, I need to shoot for Delhi 6.” So we shot for a couple of days, like 3 days, with a different beginning and ending. I put it together and that’s the film.
Then I sent it out to Europe and I think Venice Film Festival and other festivals took it on, and it kind of completed that incompleteness in me. It kind of healed me also. So it got some kind of appreciation out there.
Personal films often don’t work commercially but become cult classics later. What’s your take on this?
I wouldn’t like to compare Delhi 6 with the greats like “Kaagaz Ke Phool” or “Mera Naam Joker.” Personal expressions have a long way to go in our subcontinent because they are also somewhere hidden within them – a stark truth about yourself.
The people on the street are facing stark truth after stark truth every moment of their life. When they enter a theater, they want to escape all that. So by no stretch of imagination would I blame the audiences or put the blame on them for not understanding the starkness of cinema.
Having said that, it must be done. Having said that, you can’t do that with every film, you should not be doing it with every film. We are also in a way distributors of happiness, of entertainment. It’s a job that has been given to us, bestowed on us – to make people laugh and cry, to make them happy. At the end of it, make them fulfilled. To send them home with a sense of emptiness is also a duty at times, not all the times.
Any final thoughts on your collaboration with Rahman?
The only thing I thought was sadly so, my response to a recent article that said Delhi 6 is more relevant today than when it was made. Because it was more about times to come, I think I’ll only die with this question in my heart – I will never get the answer why don’t we love the other person for what they are and what they believe in and their belief? What is this whole tribal mentality within us to impose ourselves onto somebody else and not accept them? What is this fear which drives us?
I don’t think I’ll get the answer in this life. I try to look for it in Delhi 6. We traveled the journey together. I think we created a gem of a film, and at least that’s what people say. The music is superb, which is also like a semi-musical if you really ask me. If I were to take it to Broadway today and turn it into a musical, we have the music already – it will not be difficult to do that.
It’s not a plot-driven story, it’s a response to the environment we were living in at that point of time.
