The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©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.
Raihanah claims that her brother’s years in advertising, from the earliest ad films right up to just after Roja, were probably the happiest she had ever seen him.
‘I’m not saying that he isn’t happy now,’ she says. ‘He’s happy, but he was just . . . less serious back then. He liked to have fun. He was more easy-going about life in general.’
AR, however, does not always speak quite so positively of that time. He always says that the people he met during his jingle days are the ones who really opened him up as a person and as an artist, but confesses that he also felt trapped.
‘Up until I was about twenty-five, I used to think about suicide maybe every day,’ AR said once, in a public conversation with Bharat Bala in 2017. ‘I just felt that I was stuck and I didn’t know where I was going. I felt I was a failure at what I really wanted in life.’
Call it artist’s angst if you will, but that was how AR felt.
This was a dark time in his life, in his view, because almost everything that really meant anything to him seemed to amount to nothing. His work with his bands did not seem to be getting him anywhere. The music he was doing on his own, the non-film albums he cut, did not work. He had lost his father years before. He was making money and he was being respected for his talent, sure, but that was not enough for him.
Young AR wanted to go beyond playing at recording sessions and programming—and he did not seem to be getting the sort and quantum of recognition he wanted for his skill on that front. His creativity seemed limited as far as audiences were concerned and he did not know where his life was going.
He described it in his conversation with Munni Kabir as, ‘All those years of struggle, humiliation, being ordered around by other people, seeing worry on the faces of my family, remembering the feeling of being overwhelmed by an inferiority complex, the lack of self-esteem . . .’
Jingles at least, in his mind, were slightly better because they allowed him creativity and experimentation and also gave him an audience. They also provided access to the wild and revolutionary thinking possessed by most ad film professionals of the time.
The drawback, however, was that, in India, a man of music can’t really become a celebrity—in the classic sense of the word—doing jingles. In the West, of course, the really big singers and musicians cut their own albums. Few Hollywood composers are quite as big as they are. Similarly, in India, jingles could make you famous in advertising itself, but you couldn’t really be mainstream-famous. You had to be a movie composer for that. Rahman didn’t want to be famous, but, paradoxically, he wanted his music to be heard by as many people as possible and appreciated.
All said, jingles were still a welcome relief from his other work. ‘I was stuck in the belly of this beast called Kodambakkam,’ AR says. ‘It was the same old thing being done, always.’
‘The world of films in Kodambakkam was sort of boring,’ says Raihanah. ‘It might seem glamorous, but people were pretty fixed in their ways. There was little excitement and no change.’
Rahman did not care for the politics of Tamil cinema. And the studios were rife with a lack of creative innovation and vice. AR looked forward to coming out of those recording sessions and going off to meet an ad film-maker to do a jingle. The ad people were all young and ambitious, eager to try new things. To be different. And they believed in AR, his talent, and encouraged him to experiment.
It isn’t hard to imagine that AR, whatever else he may say, did enjoy this phase of his life too. For the first time, he and his family had a reasonable amount of money coming in. Starvation wasn’t a looming threat any more, though of course AR had to work very hard to keep it that way.
AR was also older and slowly coming into his own: while playing for other composers had been a means to an end, a means to survive, originally, AR had started to really fall in love with music by this time. And his love was being vindicated.
He had been in demand as a sessions player, the most sought-after person in that ring. And then, when he made it big as a jingle composer, when he broke into that circuit, it got even better. He could be creative and the men and women of the glamorous ad industry were after him.
‘We would all get into his car, his Ambassador, and he would take us out for dinner once in a while,’ remembers Fathima. ‘The Park Sheraton [today the Crowne Plaza in Chennai], I think, was the first star hotel we’d ever been to.’
One of AR’s fondest memories of these days is going to a restaurant called Kabul in Mylapore, which was an open-air restaurant with long, low wooden planks that served as tables. The place offered North Indian, Mughlai and Hyderabadi cuisine—all of which AR liked. He enjoyed going to the restaurant with his friends from the ad world, perhaps after a day of hard work, and eating under the stars.
Fathima says, ‘He would try to spend as much time as he could with the family, but he was usually just too busy. Amma would go to sleep at midnight. And if he hadn’t come home by then, she would ask one of us sisters to stay awake and make sure he ate.’
So it was that, as the 1980s drew to a close, Rahman’s life was going ahead in a pretty predictable fashion (another reason why he probably didn’t like it too much): jingles, recording sessions, programming and working with his bands—that was his life, pretty much. And it would have probably gone on like that forever.
That is, if one man—Mani Ratnam—hadn’t started asking around about ‘this boy’ he’d been hearing a lot about. The director was also the one who would finally satisfy AR’s long-standing and ravenous artistic hunger for something more.
