Rahman’s life after Roja

Chapter 13: The Time Of the Rose/ Notes Of A Dream by Krishna Trilok

On the day Roja was released, Rahman’s younger sister Fathima was sitting in a theatre in Chennai with her friends, all set to watch the movie. The opening credits rolled, the film began and the first song-Chinna Chinna Aasai’ as you might guess–played with the movie’s heroine singing the song, scaling Chalakudy’s waterfall and playing in the verdant fields of the South Indian countryside.

The song was already a hit and by the intermission, Fathima heard a very drunk man sitting in a seat behind her say, Evano semayaa paattu pottu vachchurukaan da.’ (Whoever did the music for this has done a great job.)

That’s when I knew,’ she says with a laugh. ‘That’s when I knew my brother had got it right. I was so proud.’ AR’s older sister Raihanah, meanwhile, was going through a similar experience in another theatre of the city. ‘One thing really hit me,’ she recalls. ‘And that’s that the people in the theatre clapped and cheered just as much when my brother’s name appeared on the credits as they did when Mani Ratnam’s name came on. That’s when I knew.

That was the moment when all doubt vanished. I knew Rahman had made it.’ Mani Ratnam himself has described Roja as a growing phenomenon that ‘took a little time to warm up’.’ It gained popularity quickly enough in Chennai and the other big cities of South India, but it took time to gather momentum in the smaller cities and, of course, to become the national sensation that it did.

The music was immediately and immensely popular, but the film had to grow over time- which of course it did. What was not to like? It was a beautifully made movie, the story was universal enough to strike a chord with anyone. And the music was superb. It had something in it for everybody.

Aside from the financial success that came with the popularity, the film and its soundtrack were both heavily feted. A lot of people involved in Roja received nominations and won at the 40th National Film Awards for their work.

The man who composed the lyrics for the album’s songs, the poet Vairamuthu, won the Silver Lotus Award for Best Lyricist for ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’ (it was the second time he won the award, and his tally currently stands at seven).

What was the really big news though was Rahman’s winning the Silver Lotus Award for Best Music Director-‘For,’ as the citation reads, ‘the harmonious blend of western and Karnatak classical music in Roja, the separate music systems complementing each other without losing their own identities. It marked the first time ever that a debutant composer won the
honour.

AR received a cash prize of Rs 10,000 along with the trophy. He also went on to win the Tamil Nadu State Award for Best Music Director and the Filmfare Best Music Director Award for the Roja album. Singer Minmini won the Tamil Nadu State Award for Best Singer for ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai”.

Meanwhile, Roja itself won the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration at the National Film Award, Mani Ratnam received the Tamil Nadu State Award for Best Director. The movie also won the Tamil Nadu State Award for Best Film.

The film’s soundtrack sold incredibly well and it was one of the few Tamil-film albums at the time to warrant a Hindi dub owing to its pan-Indian popularity. It would also be listed on Time magazine’s ten best soundtracks of all time. Rahman had officially ‘arrived’, but what was going on in the head of the man himself at the time? Not much, hand, by all accounts apparently, other than thinking about how to go about the work at hand, by all accounts.

Both Fathima and Raihanah say that he accepted the success just he had all the hardships that he had faced up until that point- with dignified calm and the certainty that it was all part of the plan of a higher power. Very like AR. Be it the Oscars or a business deal that falls through, come what may, good or bad, he accepts it all with an enviable serenity that very few humans can ever hope to possess.

IIl tell him that some corporate has agreed to our terms for some big deal and all he’ll do is smile and say “yay”,’ says Karan Grover, executive producer of Le Musk and One Heart, and the man who now helps AR with his business affairs. ‘But then I’ll tell him, “Sir, you have to buy me ice cream now,” and we’ll have someone go out and buy a tub for us.’

The only time I see him excited,’ says Jerry Vincent with a grin, ‘is when we do a good groove or a good string arrangement at the studio. His face will light up then.’

AR enjoyed his success after Roja certainly, but he was also excited about what was to come. He was living the dream now. As Trilok Nair had predicted, he was able to work less and less on creating jingles for TV commercials. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but too many directors started coming to him, asking him to make music for their films.

Rahman claimed once, in fact, that he had enough music for the next two years’ worth of films after Roja. That was how much he had composed and stored in the years leading up to his feature film debut, waiting for the right outlet. How would these have seen the light of day if he had been against doing films at all? Perhaps he would have cut an indie album with one of his bands or by himself.

That possibility certainly did seem to be on the cards until Roja happened. AR’s dream of a non-film solo album did not die after 1992, actually. It would come to fruition eventually in the form of Vande Mataram.

I wanted to do that before Roja, AR confided during a midnight conversation about Vande Mataram. I wanted to have an album, you know. But it would never have the reach I wanted. So one tiny step, a clever step, I took was doing the kind of music I wanted in the movies I was composing for.’

AR says that he ‘let the directors interpret his music. He was clear that, as a composer, he was going to be an artist, not a server.

I was expressing myself, he says. ‘And that’s why I think my music was different. I was a little headstrong, I think, creatively. I said, “I want to do this and all you guys come to my level.” I mean, I didn’t want to compromise. I wanted to push it up, for myself. That made my job interesting. I’d worked for other people, and now I wanted to do what I wanted. To enjoy my work, I had to raise my ideals. I just wanted to be creatively satisfied.’

AR’s attitude towards making music for films changed after Roja because the situation–thanks to his arrival on the scene-changed. He literally did start altering the world, albeit in a small way, with his very first album. After Roja, as far as South Indian films were concerned, it just became an unspoken necessity to have A.R. Rahman working on your movie, if you wanted to at all be taken seriously as a director.

If yours was a ‘big’ project, a really good film, then you had to have AR’s music on it. Just having his name on a movie was enough to make producers raise the size of their investment in the project, to make distributors pay a premium for the product and for TV channels to pay more for the broadcasting rights.

It was assumed the movie’s audio would be a hit and be a big income generator too. And people were willing to give AR more or less total creative freedom. Creative blinkers were no longer a valid reason to not make music for films.

Then there was the matter of dealing with the new-found popularity. AR started developing a fan base with Roja-one that would eventually spread to every continent on earth except Antarctica. AR’s fans love him and he loves them back. He always was and still is grateful for the kind of love he is receiving from them. But then constantly dealing with the adoration of admirers, while out in public, can be difficult (at times at least) for any celebrity. When he or she is at an airport after a long flight, or at a restaurant after a hard day’s work, trying to find a moment of solitude and peace . ..

Sure, we had a lot people trying to jump the gate of the house and stuff back in the early nineties,’ says Raihanah. ‘Sometimes some people I knew, fans of his, would ask me to get them a chance to meet him so that they could get an autograph or a picture. I used to oblige them earlier on, but then I stopped because it was taking up too much of Rahman’s time. He hardly had time for his family itself. It was unfair to make him do this on top of that.’

AR’s personal assistant, Samidurai, says, I’m the closest thing he has to a bodyguard, see. I try to keep people from mobbing him. It’s a tough job though. Not physically, but I feel sad to deprive so many people kids especially of a chance to interact with him. That’s hard. But it has to be done, right? Nowadays though I actually keep my distance from Sir in public so that I don’t have to come across as the bad bouncer.’

‘He started getting loads of letters from fans after Roja too,’ remembers Raihanah. I used to read them and write replies, get his approval for those replies and his signature. Once we even got a letter from someone saying they wanted to marry him. I didn’t even show him that one. I mean, come on, saying you want to marry someone is going a little too far . . !

In the age of selfies, pleasing fans is becoming ever more of a task. They’ll say, “Come forward, sir, smile, sir, oh sorry, wrong camera, sir, AR says with a laugh. We’re like digital food for them … Gotta get the likes on Instagram and Facebook. He adds.

But I put it up in KM [Conservatory] that you’ll be fined if you take selfies. You can’t drink, you can’t smoke and you can’t take selfies with the principal! He grins. No selfies are the last rule. I didn’t want to be rude and put it upfront. It had to build up to that.’

I think that’s my fault,’ laughs Jyothi Nair Belliappa of the KM Conservatory. ‘I was an English professor at Presidency College [in Chennai] before joining KM. Rahmanji happened to meet me once and suggested I work for him. I couldn’t say no. And I used to keep asking for pictures with him whenever he visited KM, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. At one point, he started calling Fathima ma’am whenever he was going to come by to tell her, “Please ask Jyothi not take pictures”. But he is so generous and understanding that once, much later, when my daughter had come from the US to visit, he said All right, come to the gate and we’ll take a picture,” because he knew I really wanted one.’

AR’s talent can’t ever be doubted, but one also has to remember chat-like a lot of other artists who went on to become legends–he was at the right place at the right time. He entered the scene when music in India could be consumed through Walkmans and cassettes and CDs.

That really helped his music grow. The reach that was possible for his work at the time was definitely a part of what made him bigger than anyone who’d come before him in India. Rahman was also the first Indian composer who paid any attention to the fact that music was going to be consumed on its own. That it was going to be a private experience. Up until that time, music was just a part of the movie-watching experience and that’s how composers viewed the work they were doing. But with the advent of the 1990s, more and more people were listening on their headphones or on cassette players So the quality of the sound had to be better. Music was an entity b itself and not just part of a film.

Indian sounds were tinny before Rahman, says Rajiv Menon. We were really underperforming in terms of sound, and AR refused to deal with engineers who were not willing to produce the kind of rich sounds he wanted initially. He was obsessed with getting the best possible quality of sound. And at around this time, many filmmakers were focusing on providing a better film experience. They had to get people back into theatres. Sound had to be as good as the films that were being made. Mani Ratnam movies, for example, had scale and novelty, so the sound had to follow suit. The sound had to be as good as the film or the final product wasn’t going to work as a whole. It would be like taking an iPhone and packaging it in newspaper.’

All in all, back in the 1990s, Rahman really could make a film. A very ordinary film could be elevated to a whole other level just by his songs and background score. It was similar to Santosh Sivan’s cinematography or Kamal Haasan’s acting. It wasn’t just the film’s quality that he improved- people came into the theatres to hear his music and see how his songs had been used in the movie.

Things are a little different now, of course. Other music composers who are plenty savvy with cutting-edge musical equipment, who can create futuristic and intriguing sounds, have arrived. And we have the Internet through which we can consume music–musical sequences in movies, in particular. Just having great songs and background scores does not make a film run any more, and having AR as a part of your team isn’t on its own enough to command big monies from investors.

Music doesn’t mean as much to people these days as it did to us in those days,’ says Rajiv Menon. Modern cinema is moving away from song sequences. People don’t go to see songs anymore. But change is inevitable and there’s nothing to be done about that. The audience wants direct stories.’ But even now, if you have a real ‘mega-budget movie’ of ‘quality, Indian entertainment culture (at the least in the South) practically dictates that you get Rahman to compose for it.

Does AR agree to compose for every movie film-makers bring his way? His sister Raihanah says, ‘If a story is really good and he sees potential in it, he’ll do the film. If he feels he owes the director for some past favour, or if the two of them connect well, he’ll do the film.

What matters to him is being able to connect with the director, one way or another. That and the character of the director. Sometimes he takes advice from Amma. She might suggest to him, “Don’t work with that guy, he doesn’t give the right vibe.” That’s rare though. He’ll listen maybe 15 per cent of the time.’

One needs to mess up really badly for AR to refuse to work with them. ‘Messing up’ usually constitutes disrespecting him, his music or his values. And some directors have messed up big-time, badly enough for AR to show them the door- at least temporarily. The composer, however, will never alienate anybody. He will find ways to avoid working with them, but you will find no instances of open altercations in all his life.

‘Rahman will only refuse to work with a director if he gets a very bad feeling about him or his script, or if the film-maker has a bad reputation,’ says Raihanah. ‘And if he feels that way, no amount of money can make him change his mind.’

Early in his career, AR couldn’t afford to turn down work simply because he didn’t like who he was working with, or because they were encroaching on his music. He had to bring in the cash his family needed to survive. But after he started making enough to create a comfortable life for himself, he never went after money if it meant compromising on his values or dignity.

Rahman will also agree to a project if it has some really big names attached to it. A big star or a great director. He will compose for such a movie, because it works in his favour. The film is sure to get a lot of attention and that automatically results in more attention for AR’s work. For someone whose life revolves around his work though, all accounts suggest that AR only occasionally actually talks about it outside of the studio. He does not talk business at home, doesn’t chat with his family about it over dinner.

‘He does it very rarely,’ says Raihanah. ‘And by rarely, I mean maybe once in ten years. He’ll say something like “Oh this director is torturing me!” or “This guy doesn’t even know the basics of music and he’s trying to tell me everything I should do.’

At one point, Raihanah says, AR even wanted to construct a secret escape route from his studio to the house so that he could flee Panchathan whenever directors he didn’t like came in. ‘He didn’t build it though,’ she says. Unless it’s there secretly and even I don’t know about it.’

AR says he used to rely on ‘just instinct while selecting films to compose for. Sometimes, it panned out well for everybody. At other times, Rahman confesses, it proved to be a bad decision resulting in some very good music ending up in films that were either simply mediocre or turned out to be box-office disasters.

‘He never complains about that though, . says Jerry Silvester Vincent. ‘He won’t feel bad about it. We are the ones who’ll feel bad, seeing such good music being used in a bad film or a film that flopped.’

I tell him very often that he should have given the music he created for some other film to me instead,’ Mani Ratnam says with a laugh. There is also the issue of directors who have no idea about even the basic notes of music coming in and ‘suggesting’ what kind of music AR should be doing. ‘And some directors will be very indecisive too,’ adds Jerry Vincent. They don’t know what they want so they keep asking for new things, and then they go back to something they heard previously and keep swinging between the two. That can annoy Sir, mainly because each song is like his baby.’

‘And sometimes someone hears a very raw version of the song and they like it more than the finished song,’ says AR. ‘So you have to find a balance between what they like and a well- and fully produced song.’ The biggest problem of them all though, according to AR, is how sometimes what a director wants from him is in itself very mediocre.

The expectation itself is very low. ‘Even if you give them something great, they just don’t want it,’he reflects. Instead they’Il want something very ordinary. But they’re paying you so you gotta to do what they want you to do.’

And indeed there are directors AR feels obliged to. Mani Ratnam, Rajiv Menon, Bharat Bala, Kathir–these men, he feels, have contributed to him becoming who he is, who have put faith and money in him, and who have been mentors and good friends and good people. He goes the extra mile for them.

I think the quality of a film’s music is completely in the director’s hands,’ says Fathima. ‘Some take time and push for great music. Some rush him and take whatever they get.’ ‘He gives his 100 per cent for every project though,’ Raihanah adds. ‘He will never say “oh this is a small film” or “this is a new director” and do a half-hearted job.’

The soundtracks AR composes for Mani Ratnam, though, are particularly close to his heart. And for Kathir, who had a fallout with Raja and approached AR and gave him an advance, asking him to compose for him even before Roja, who put his faith in the man when he was still a nobody, AR will always generate music that is unusually good, regardless of the script and the pay.

‘That core of goodness in him is fantastic,’ says Sharada Trilok. ‘He never forgets a debt of gratitude. And it’s not like he says, “He did that for me, so I’ll help him once and that’s it.” It’s a lifelong thing for him. He never stops giving back, and that’s really amazing. A lot of people lose their old connections as they get bigger, but he hasn’t done that. He could have easily forgotten about all the people he’d worked with during his jingle days in the 1990s, when he was literally growing bigger each day. But he didn’t. He’s kept everyone from the old days in his life . . . And he makes no secret of how much they all mean to him.’