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.
The creativity that was required for 99 Songs came from Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, but then there was capital of another and more literal sort that needed sourcing. And production money for the film didn’t just have to be found, it also had to be managed.
Funding for 99 Songs eventually came from Ideal Entertainment, a production house based in Toronto, Canada. The president and CEO of Ideal, Shaji Nada, and its managing director, Ramanan Muthulingam, are Sri Lankan Tamils who emigrated to Canada while still very young, due to the unrest in their home country. They are both Rahman fans too. Ramanan, in fact, openly says that AR’s music, his Tamil music, was what kept him and many others going during the darkest days of their childhood.
When they heard AR was looking for partners who could help him make the movies he wanted, Ideal was quick to take the chance, and it worked in everyone’s favour. Ideal was looking to move into film production, had the required resources and desired to be publicly associated with A.R. Rahman. They agreed to invest in 99 Songs. That is how production began. Ideal also invested in Le Musk and One Heart.
‘If I had to put in my own money, I would’ve really thought about making these movies,’ AR grins. ‘But then when we found these guys who were willing to invest in my projects I was like, “Sounds good, sounds good. Let’s go ahead and make ’em then.”’ But then, turning serious, he adds, ‘I think it’s good though. You take your work more seriously because you’re using someone else’s money. You do a better job. It’s like any freedom; it comes with responsibility. I have the money and I could do whatever I wanted with it, but I have a responsibility now to spend it wisely, so Ideal can make money on these movies. It improves the script, production, everything. And that’s good.’
Karan Grover, a former Nokia employee who now helps Rahman with his business affairs, served as producer for Le Musk and One Heart. Karan has been a part of AR’s team for over ten years now. A soft-spoken, silver-haired, Delhi-based man with great spiritual rooting himself, he is very loyal to AR.
‘When I was still working with Nokia,’ says Karan, ‘I happened to meet Rahman sir in London, in the house of Mohan Chopra, who was a friend of my father’s and the managing director of Xerox at the time. He is a very well-connected man. That was when I first saw Rahman sir. He and Mohan Chopra were friends and he’d come over to his house in London. Rahman sir and I went on a trip to Ajmer together sometime after that, I don’t remember when. And then of course Sir worked a lot with Nokia, and that’s how I really got to know him. Even while working in Nokia I started helping Sir with his business affairs. And I eventually started working for him full-time in February 2015.’
While Karan was still with Nokia, AR collaborated with the company on several ventures, including his anti-poverty anthem ‘Pray for Me Brother’ in 2007. Rahman also tied up with the Finnish company for the release of a Nokia edition of his 2008 album Connections. Connections was primarily a compilation of some of AR’s own favourite songs, but the Nokia edition of the album featured fresh material—including the zesty ‘Jiya Se Jiya’—and was released exclusively on Nokia XpressMusic devices.
AR has one primary criterion when it comes to choosing the folks who work for him. As clichéd as it might sound, what he requires of his employees, above all else, is that they be decent people. That is paramount. Be it his domestic staff, his sound engineers, his programmers or his managers, the attributes AR really values are patience, a willingness to work hard, integrity and a lot of positivity. Even efficiency and expertise come second because those things, at the end of the day, can be learnt. And, while it is not an open requirement, devotion to AR is preferred—for it ensures both loyalty and a willingness to keep up with the erratic timings that are the norm in his life.
Karan Grover certainly possesses all of these qualities. The man also brought a good deal else to the table. For instance, he has good contacts in the corporate and entertainment worlds both, thanks to his time at Nokia. And AR values that.
‘Sir, in fact, mentioned my name when he was thanking people on stage after he got the Golden Globe in 2008,’ Karan says. ‘All day that day, people at the Nokia office in Delhi were asking me about it.’
At heart, Karan Grover is an exceedingly simple man who is not enamoured by the power, monies and celebrities that swirl around him on a regular basis. He was also supportive of AR’s getting into filmmaking. Rahman had been toying with the idea of making movies for a while, but it was Karan who gave him the push out of the door, saying that production money would come if he truly wanted to make films. He assured AR that they could source funding for movies if AR was serious about making them.
Karan Grover handled executive production on both Le Musk and One Heart, and was also closely involved in the process of entering into a contract for funds with Ideal Entertainment in Canada.
‘I don’t care about the credits,’ says Karan. ‘It’s just the journey and the experience of working with Sir that matters to me. That’s invaluable. In fact, on One Heart I don’t even think I should get credit.’
However, for the much larger and more complicated 99 Songs, AR knew that Karan would need help—especially given that he had so many other ventures of Rahman’s to handle. Another executive producer was urgently needed.
So it was that Sharada Trilok was called on to serve as joint producer with Karan Grover on 99 Songs, after the script for the film was settled upon in 2016. Sharada had worked on big-budget movies in the past, such as Mani Ratnam’s epic adventure film Raavan in 2010 and Bejoy Nambiar’s action–thriller David in 2013. She and AR had even worked together for a short while in 2014, when she served as producer on the music videos for two songs (‘Aabhi Jaa’ and ‘Laadli’) from an album called Raunaq that AR created for the former minister of education, Kapil Sibal.
Sharada and AR have known each other for a long time. It was she and her husband, the ad film-maker Trilok Nair, who made the TV commercials that featured some of AR’s most popular jingles way back in the 1980s. She is also the daughter of S. Krishnamoorthy, one of the biggest South Indian producers of the 1960s and 1970s, and cousin of director Mani Ratnam. It is, in fact, through her and Trilok that Rahman met Mani Ratnam and got the chance to do Roja in 1992. She is one of AR’s closest friends and he trusts her and her judgment unreservedly.
