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.
While it is compelling to imagine the young Rahman going to various film-makers, trying to get a chance to make music for them, being turned down and vowing that he would make it big one day, that couldn’t be more removed from the truth. It might come as a surprise to a lot of people, but the fact is that A.R. Rahman didn’t want to do music for films originally.
To this day, AR considers his real youth to be the years he spent creating jingles for TV commercials, ad films. This might seem kind of strange because he was almost a grown man by the time his advertising days came around, but it isn’t surprising when you think about it.
AR’s childhood was cut brutally short when his father died, and he never went to college—though he has received several honorary degrees from several top musical institutions, including Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
AR sat for the Trinity College of Music in London’s exam through Musee Musicals when he was thirteen. He did not go to London, but took the exam in Chennai itself. In fact, Rahman has never sat in the classrooms of a music school with people around him living and breathing music. One gets the feeling he regrets this a little. On 99 Songs, for instance, his only specification for a university that featured in the movie was that it “look like the kind of college I wish I’d gone to.”
It wasn’t that AR couldn’t afford to go to college (the truth isn’t that romantically tragic), but that he just became too busy when he finally had the means to do so. He had to play for composers making music for movies. He had his work as a programmer. And by the mid-1980s, he was also one of South India’s most in-demand composer of jingles, music for advertisement films.
“He enjoyed doing jingles,” remembers Raihanah. “They were so much shorter in duration and each was different. Plus, he enjoyed being with the advertising people.”
Many of the ad film directors the young Rahman worked with remain his close friends to this day: Rajiv Menon, who would go on to work with AR on three movies, Minsara Kanavu, Kandukondain Kandukondain and Sarvam Thaala Mayam; Suresh Chandra Menon, whose 1993 Tamil movie Pudhiya Mugam AR composed for; Bharat Bala, who collaborated with AR on Vande Mataram and also for his 2013 movie Maryan; and Trilok Nair, to name a few.
By all accounts, including his own, AR probably learnt the most during those days in advertising. The people he met from the world of ads were, to use Rahman’s favourite word, “cool.” They saw a lot of Hollywood movies and listened to a lot of Western music. More than anything else, they came from the stylish and English-speaking world of advertising. They dressed differently from the people AR had worked with up until then. They spoke differently. Films just didn’t have the kind of style that the advertising world did in Chennai during the 1980s.
Rahman picked stuff up from them at a scorching pace during those years. The kind of references the advertising professionals were showing him opened his world up. He was exposed to content he’d never seen before. He was also learning a lot about how the “in crowd” talked and behaved, and about popular fashion—especially towards the end of his jingle days, when he was making the transition to movies. When he was composing jingles, AR used to dress like all the other young people in advertising, wearing T-shirts and jeans. As he started attending award shows and doing photoshoots though, he understood he’d have to start paying more attention to his appearance. (Later on, Saira, his wife, would take charge of that aspect of his life.)
According to Kamini Mathai, the first jingle that Rahman ever composed that went out for public consumption was for an ad film for a photo studio in Kerala, directed by a man named Thomas Isaac Kattukapully—who happened to hear AR play his keyboard at one of Ilayaraja’s recording sessions in Chennai’s Prasad Studios.
The young AR found that he enjoyed doing jingles for the creative freedom they gave him and discovered that it was also a way to earn some more cash. It was as simple as that. He had no intentions of one day scoring for films, so it wasn’t that scoring for TV commercials was the logical first step in that direction. He had no such dreams because, at the time, practicalities took priority over dreams for AR.
Playing for established musical directors was rewarding financially, so that was his primary focus.
The jingles for TV adverts only came next. Even when he was doing jingles in earnest, during the mid-1980s, AR would often disappear for days together and not be reachable by ad film directors or producers. He would go off to do his programming or be playing at recording sessions. He used to say to his advertising friends that, with all due respect, he could make in a couple days’ worth of programming the money he could make on a single advertisement jingle.
And composing for films? That was not even thought of.
Back then, the money—not to mention the creative freedom and innovation—in making music for movies just wasn’t alluring enough to warrant Rahman’s time or interest.
One thing AR did want though was for his music to be heard as widely as possible, but considering what he was doing back in the 1980s it seemed somewhat unlikely that he imagined films to be the vehicle of his choosing to do all he wanted to. Perhaps he expected one of his bands to take off or that he would cut his own album of non-film music in the near future. But there was never an intention to go looking for directors and convince them to let him score for them.
Destiny, however, would come calling at his door.
