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.
In April 2017, AR was putting the finishing touches to a very special something that he had composed, The Flying Lotus—an orchestral piece commissioned by the Seattle Symphony. It is essentially a musical chronicle of India’s journey from Independence in 1947 to the present day.
It is telling that he has named it what he has. The lotus is one of India’s most loved and revered flowers, but it has historically had strong ties to Hinduism. At a time when issues of religious intolerance were at the forefront of internal tensions in India, AR seemed to be making a subtle statement. It is also symbolic of his moving away from the strictest tenets of Islam and becoming more inclined to the concept of general spiritualism as he matures. ‘Going more and more into the Sufi zone’, as he describes it.
The Flying Lotus is a beautiful piece of work. Particularly intriguing is one point where the voice of India’s incumbent prime minister, Narendra Modi, is used as a sample—to signify the period of the 2016 Indian banknote demonetization, from when it was announced to the travails people faced as a result, and the change and the progress that was ushered in subsequently. Rahman’s music tries to capture all those emotions.
AR is excited about The Flying Lotus. He played the music for me much ahead of its debut, when I went to spend some time with him in Mumbai. ‘It sounds awesome!’ he says happily. ‘It needs a little more work though. It needs to have balls! We have to have balls, whatever we do!’
He took a lot of pride in describing what the various parts of the music were meant to communicate. And I couldn’t help but ask him if he wasn’t worried that all these intricacies—all of which he has slaved on—might be lost on an ordinary person, a regular Joe who didn’t understand Western orchestral music.
AR just shakes his head and says, ‘The people who need to know what it means will understand. Everyone else can just enjoy it as music.’
We are driving through the streets of Mumbai in AR’s car, a plain, simple Toyota Innova. (AR is not into fancy cars. He has an Audi in Chennai, but that’s about it. In Mumbai, if he has to attend a prestigious event, he will rent a BMW or some such.)
The car has no tinted windows or anything of the like. You’d think that this might cause some problems, but, surprisingly enough, almost no one on the roads pays the vehicle or its passengers the least attention. Inside sits a man who many of them would do almost anything to catch just a glimpse of—including waiting under a burning sun or wrestling against a surging, throbbing crowd—but now they are oblivious.
We stop at a traffic signal, and right by the road is a little teashop. Some old men drinking chai look right at the car, but don’t see who’s sitting in it. There’s a girl in her early twenties standing nearby, talking on her phone, and she’s looking right at the car and speaking, unseeing of who she’s looking at.
I cannot help wondering about these people who don’t notice. It makes one think about those proclamations made by the folks who keep saying we’re on the verge of some kind of technological apocalypse, that more and more people are living without really absorbing what’s happening around them in the real world. I discussed it with AR, one of the biggest champions of all things tech.
When I ask him about the blurring lines between reality and the digital world he says, ‘It’s like dreaming, right?’ You can have great and terrible things to dream about and it’s like an alternate reality, but finally you wake up and you’re back in the real world. All this technology will help bolster human relationships. If I miss my mother, I could only call her and talk to her, at the most, at one point of time. But now I can Skype her, I can actually see how she is doing, everything. It’s amazing.’
He adds almost challengingly, ‘There’s no need to be scared of technology; what’s there to be scared about?’
We are on our way to Pali Hill, to No. 75 Nargis Dutt Road where the shoot for 99 Songs is under way. It is over an hour’s drive from AR’s residence in Powai to Pali Hill and it is just AR, Karan Grover, his adviser on business affairs and one of the executive producers on 99 Songs, and me in the car.
Several times, bikers cut across the Innova and swear at the driver in Hindi. AR doesn’t care for Mumbai’s awful traffic. At one point, he jokingly suggests that we take the metro next time around. ‘That might be fun, no?’ he says. ‘What do you think?’
Karan Grover tells him that the train lines don’t pass through the area we want to go to.
As we drive, AR makes a few calls and replies to a few emails on his iPhone. Long car rides and international flights are his downtime. He also opens his phone camera from time to time and takes photos and videos of random things, such as bikers and posters, and edits them on his phone. AR is an avid photographer. His wife, Saira, says he takes some of the best pictures she’s seen.
At one point, I ask him how he manages to do so many things at the same time. He has several albums and songs to work on, dozens of business deals to see to, a whole lot of concert commitments. And now he has movies to oversee as well, to say nothing of the demands of his personal life. How does he juggle it all? Why does he juggle it all?
‘Survival,’ he says earnestly. ‘It’s all about survival.’ He looks out the window. ‘I’ve been doing many things at the same time right from when I was a boy. Some of those things I didn’t want to do. Some things I couldn’t do. Some things I had to give up. But I know what it’s like to have to do a lot of things at once. You learn to do it all if you want to stay alive.’ He adds after a short pause, ‘But I don’t feel like I’m doing a lot. In fact, right now I’m only thinking about what more I can do, what else I can do. There’s still so much out there.’
The car stops at a traffic signal. Young boys in ragged clothes weave their way among the waiting cars, carrying books and magazines to sell. One boy, no older than ten or eleven, comes up to the car, his face dusty and his hair dishevelled. He looks tired, but when he looks in through the window, at who is sitting at the back of the car, his eyes light up and he grins from ear to ear.
AR smiles back at him.
The boy holds up one of the books he’s trying to sell. It is a copy of the Hindi movie director Karan Johar’s autobiography, An Unsuitable Boy.
AR shakes his head. The boy lowers the book, but he doesn’t look disappointed. He is still smiling. He waves. AR waves back.
The little boy keeps looking into the car, with an expression that clearly suggests his day has been made. At last, the traffic light turns green; the little boy has to back away. And AR’s Innova speeds off towards Pali Hill.
