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.
So given his work commitments, his hectic schedule, how did AR manage to go to school?
‘With difficulty,’ says Raihanah.
AR certainly had the ability to learn quickly. His mother used to read out his Tamil lessons—the language was the only subject she could help him with—while he was lying down after a day spent working. AR used to listen to everything she read out, commit it to memory and do reasonably well at school—in that one subject at any rate.
Where the other subjects were concerned, the story was a little different.
‘Rahman was actually a disciplined student,’ Raihanah says. ‘He says he was bad, but he really wasn’t. He just didn’t have the time to study. Without touching his books, he would manage to get a forty on hundred or something. If he had studied, he would have done much better. The thing is, his standards are so high now that he thinks he was bad because he didn’t always get full marks.’
People who attended Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan (PSBB), in Nungambakkam, Chennai, the first school AR went to, remember Rahman as a timid, good-natured little boy who didn’t talk much, but who was a staple at any musical event that took place in, or was organized by, the school.
K.P. Rajan, a former PSBB student and classmate of AR’s who now lives in the US says of Rahman: ‘Was he quiet? Yes. Was he introverted? Totally. When you talked to him, his replies were usually monosyllabic. It wasn’t like he was just lost in his own dream world. Perhaps he was, to an extent, but you have to remember that his father had recently died, and he was working hard in the evenings to support his family. He had a lot on his mind. Plus PSBB is a school where you had these really confident, bright and sophisticated kids coming in—and I think he felt a little intimidated. You never heard him complain though. Not once.’
For PSBB, whenever it had to be represented anywhere musically, Rahman was the guy to call on.
‘He and I got to know each other when we were around twelve or thirteen, though we weren’t close,’ says Rajan. ‘He didn’t really have any close friends. I’d gone over to his house once or twice but he’d never visited mine. He was too busy with his work. And whenever he had to perform at one of the school’s plays or musical shows, I would help him carry his synthesizer to the stage. Damn, that thing was heavy . . .’
Despite the fact that PSBB recognized and encouraged his musical talent, AR’s time there was not without some friction between student and school. Like most Indian schools, PSBB has always placed a great deal of value on academic excellence. Talk to the average Indian parent and you will find that they are, more likely than not, hardcore believers in the notion that academic excellence is the only thing that defines a person’s worth. Indian schools, consequentially, mirror this philosophy. PSBB was no different. The institution was fully in line with the ideals of the general Indian public—and its founder and former principal, Rajalakshmi Parthasarathy, commonly called Mrs YGP.
Mrs YGP (YGP for Yechan Gunja Parthasarathy was the name of her late husband, a playwright and dramatist) not only founded PSBB, the ‘main school’, in Chennai, but also helped open several branches of the institution all over South India. Mrs YGP is as patrician as they come, hailing from an influential and respected Brahmin family that was once involved in the Indian independence movement. She hobnobs with the rich and famous of Chennai, is highly cultured, brilliant and remarkably dynamic. She is also (consequentially perhaps) terribly blunt, doesn’t beat about the bush for an instant.
Nearly at a century of age now, she is still as energetic and sharp as she was thirty years ago, when she was PSBB’s principal. And by all accounts, back in her time, she was a tough headmistress, a strict disciplinarian, who expected her pupils to perform up to her very high expectations. And one of her students in particular, because of his work commitments, couldn’t quite deliver on that front.
The young AR routinely missed classes at school and failed exams. Owing to the fact that he was so heavily invested in supporting his family, he didn’t have the time to study or attend classes.
His classmate K.P. Rajan says, ‘He wasn’t a brilliant student. He turned out to be brilliant in other things, but he wasn’t a brilliant student. I wasn’t particularly good when it came to studies either—and unlike him, I wasn’t good at much else either—and we usually flunked a bunch of subjects together, he and I. I would be flipping, terrified about what my dad was going to say. He would just shrug and sigh exasperatedly, ‘Enna panradhu?’ (What to do?) It certainly bothered him, but he just had his own way of dealing with it. He never got worked up.’
Mrs YGP, however, did not take her student’s failures with quite the same serenity. She summoned young Rahman and his mother into her office and told them they were making a mistake. She believed—not without reason—that a child of that age should be focusing on his academics, not working, whatever his circumstances. She believed that an education was the only thing that could truly help somebody support his family, in the long run at least.
The irony probably hits with all the force of a runaway train now, but that was what Mrs YGP said. And she wasn’t entirely wrong. In all fairness, AR’s school and all its teachers were simply doing what they believed was right for their student. They believed a good schooling and academic distinction was the only thing that could help one get settled. And with good reason—for every A.R. Rahman who has made it big, there are a hundred struggling musicians out there.
AR himself harbours no bad feeling towards his first school. Nobody in his family does. He doesn’t begrudge his teachers for not being more understanding, and you’ll never hear him complain that his school didn’t do anything to help him when he was going through so much personally at that age.
His sister Raihanah feels the same way. ‘At least Mrs YGP is positive about what AR has achieved since. And the school did do a lot of good for him. The English he speaks now is because of PSBB and they are proud of him. I don’t think we can say anything negative about it now.’
Eventually though, AR was pulled out of PSBB and enrolled at another school nearby called MCN for a year where he finished his tenth grade. He was then made to shift schools again—this time to Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School (MCC), a very old and reputed institution in Chetpet, where all the rich, famous and powerful of the city sent their children. The institution was far more liberal and easy-going than his previous schools.
‘He liked MCC,’ recalls Raihanah. ‘He was happy there and excited that he was going to a “cool” school which encouraged music. He got admitted only because of his musical talent, as it happens. They really appreciated that sort of thing over there. He had a gear cycle back then and he would wear his gum boots and cycle to school.’
The catch was that his work commitments were becoming ever more pressing.
‘Very often, almost as soon as he entered the school and went to class, I would run in right after him and call him out again, saying that someone had called him for a recording session,’ remembers Raihanah. ‘He would get upset and say, “I just got here, and you guys are calling me out so soon.”’
The conflict AR had to endure, between the demands and rigors of school life and his responsibilities towards his family and work, was fast intensifying. Eventually, it got to the point where he had to bring it up with his mother, saying that he was finding it difficult to do justice to both.
‘He came to Amma and told her he couldn’t work and go to school,’ recalls Fathima. ‘It was one or the other. So he asked her if he should focus on studying or if he should continue working and doing music. Amma didn’t hesitate. She told him to drop out of school and focus on music. She said we could see about the studying later.’
Years later, AR said that he himself wasn’t too sure about getting into music full-time when the decision was made. He wasn’t entirely confident about it and would’ve liked to do ‘something scientific’. But his mother took the decision for him—and he will forever be grateful to her for it.
‘I was terrified,’ he recalls. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure about leaving school. I didn’t know what was going to become of me. That was a tough time.’
Today, A.R. Rahman is on the list of notable alumni of all the schools he attended.
His former classmate from his first school, K.P. Rajan, met him many, many years later. ‘Rahman was performing in Washington DC and I was able to spend a few minutes with him backstage,’ remembers Rajan. The conversation turned, eventually, to their days in school.
‘I was feeling upset about the way the school had treated him,’ says Rajan. ‘And I told him that.’
But then AR said something that ‘stunned’ Rajan: ‘You know, Rajan, I have only very good memories of my days in school. I don’t remember anything unpleasant about it at all.’
‘I really couldn’t say anything to that,’ says Rajan. ‘Here I was, a nobody, still feeling angry about something that wasn’t even about me. And in front of me stood this great, famous man, one of the most popular Indians on earth, indirectly telling me he’s forgiven and moved on. He held no bitterness at all. I was shocked. And he wasn’t putting up an act. Why would he have to do that? He really meant it. I learnt the lesson of a lifetime that night. I felt so small and petty.’
One of Rahman’s greatest strengths is his almost absolute inability to hold on to negativity, his willingness to see the good in everything—past, present and future. He isn’t the sort of man who spends much time thinking about the past (if he does reminisce, he keeps it a closely guarded secret), and when he has to talk about the past, he only focuses on the positive things. Even when he recounts the worst of times he went through, he talks about them positively. That makes sense, of course, for someone who believes so strongly in positive vibes being the cornerstone of a good life.
And why? Probably because as he said to none other than his former principal, Mrs YGP, at a dinner party once, ‘When you point a finger at someone, you have three fingers pointing back at you and one finger pointing at God.’
