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.
Give AR a gadget, and he will learn everything about how it works in a remarkably short period of time. Give him a little longer with it, and he will probably take it apart and figure out its inner workings too. He loves to understand how machines work.
As Fathima puts it, ‘I can easily see him being a very brilliant engineer in another life, under different circumstances.’
During the 1970s, when AR was growing up, technology per se was pretty alien to the regular Indian. Almost no one had things like televisions and telephones. Computers, for all practical purposes, did not exist. The scenario was not at all like it is today, when even a three-year-old knows how to use a smartphone. Back then, children had little or no access to anything tech and, even if they did, they didn’t pay it much attention. Tech wasn’t cool.
AR, however, was different from other children. He was always incredibly curious about any electrical or mechanical device. And since his father kept a good many electric instruments at home, the young Rahman always had a reasonable degree of access to both recording equipment and instruments. He particularly liked synthesizers; they combined his two great loves—technology and music. When he was around ten, he used to shut himself up in his room in the evenings and patiently, scientifically deconstruct the keyboards his mother had bought him.
‘He used to take it apart completely and try to understand just why every single piece was there,’ recalls Fathima. ‘He wanted to understand how the circuit boards worked, how the electricity became music, the wiring, everything.’
All of this was done in secret though. Usually, when anyone knocked on his door, he would open it only after a few minutes because he had to hide all evidence of what he’d been up to.
One day, his eldest sister, Raihanah, decided she had to know what her brother was up to when he was locked in his room. She went out and peeked into AR’s room through a window.
‘He forgot to close that,’ she laughs.
She caught her brother right in the middle of one of his studies. Needless to say, she promptly told her mother. Kareema Begum walked into the room and, when she saw what her son was up to, her gasp of horror might well have drained the air right out of Chennai. ‘Do you know how much that cost?’ she exclaimed. ‘I had to pledge my jewellery to get that keyboard. It’s hard-earned money!’
But AR, glaring at his older sister, just told them to leave and come back in the morning. He promised that he’d have the keyboard together and working fine. And, true to his word, he did just that.
If one were to do a retrospective of great artists through the ages, AR’s affinity for science wouldn’t be quite so surprising. Leonardo da Vinci was as much an engineer as he was a painter. Vitruvius was a writer as well as an architect. Steve Jobs saw the technology he was creating as art. And Alfred Hitchcock was a drafting technician much before he started making movies. Analytical, logical brains endowed with limitless imagination have often produced great beauty, if history is anything to go by.
But the young AR was still, in many ways, a regular kid. He enjoyed playing cricket with the other neighbourhood kids and he loved to fly kites. Family members recall how acquaintances would actually convince AR to play at small-time concerts they were organizing by buying him a new kite.
‘He and I were kind of like the closest of the four siblings,’ says Fathima. ‘I used to go to the terrace and fly kites with him for hours when we were children. I was his partner in crime, so to speak. We used to play games together, and I used to help him when he was experimenting with his gadgets.’
Today, AR is an expert drone operator. He can operate the flying machines with skill and confidence. When one of his staff members, surprised by how well he controls them, commented on the fact, AR said to him with a laugh, ‘Naan chinna vayasula ethana pattam vitturuppaen.’ (I used to fly a lot of kites when I was a kid.)
It took him a while to perfect the art of flying drones though. ‘The first time we bought one, Sir crashed it on the first day itself. We had to get another one then,’ says Ashik Mohammed, one of AR’s personal assistants and one of the men in charge of maintaining and transporting his arsenal of equipment—cameras, drones and instruments.
The young AR enjoyed video games too. Fathima recalls going with her brother to buy Sega games as a child. When there was a level he couldn’t get past, he would tell his sisters to try and crack it while he went off to work. They would try and do it before he came home. And if they couldn’t, AR and his sisters would all sit and try to clear it together.
It wasn’t, of course, all fun and games. ‘He used to practise very hard, every day,’ says Fathima. ‘Remember, this was when he wasn’t even really a teenager yet. In the evenings he used to practise. He was probably composing even then, I don’t know. And he used to work too, obviously. He used to go to various musical directors who were recording and play for them. There used to be this show called Wonder Balloon on Doordarshan which he performed on. He was very young—ten or eleven. It was a popular show and he became quite famous because everyone used to watch it. All the other kids in our neighbourhood were very excited to see him on the show and he became famous in the area. It was a big deal to be on TV in those days.’
‘It was never about being famous for me,’ says AR. ‘I never went after fame. I was quite famous even when I was a kid, so I never really got into doing music for films because I wanted to be famous. That was never the intention.’
