The article which appears below, was originally published on Times of India in February 2009. ©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.
As Valli Arunachalam, principal, Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan, Nungambakkam, hands out a black-and-white class photo taken years ago, she asks with a smile, “Can you spot A.R. Rahman?” She then points to the little boy next to her in the frame and says excitedly, “That’s him, that’s him!”
“He was a quiet boy,” says Valli Arunachalam, who was A.R. Rahman’s seventh grade class teacher. “He sat in the front row of my class. Even then, his hair used to fall over his forehead and I used to keep telling him to have it cut. But he never did,” she adds.
When A.R. Rahman was in school, Mrs. Y.G. Parthasarathy, currently the dean, was principal. She remembers Rahman as a “music master”. “He was a one-man orchestra, he and his keyboard,” she says.
Chandra Ramani, his Hindi teacher, says she remembers going to his house in a cycle rickshaw so they could return with his keyboard. “He was a little boy,” she says. “He couldn’t lift the keyboard on his own.”
Raji Babu, his class six science teacher, says many years later when they called Rahman to school to felicitate him, the function had started at 6.30 pm and was to go on for more than an hour. “Rahman excused himself from the stage for a while and went backstage to perform namaz,” she says.
Outside of school, one of Rahman’s favourite teachers was his piano teacher Jacob John, who passed away a few years ago in Liverpool, where he lived with his daughter Tanya Paul after he retired.
Every time Rahman was in UK he would visit John. “A.R. was the son of my dad’s good friend Sekhar. My mum says he used to come for lessons on Sundays. He came to my father for 15 years. My father thought he was a prodigious talent,” she says.
Rahman went to visit her father in the UK six months before he died. “Though bedridden, my father seemed to find a new lease of life on seeing A.R. They discussed music through the night. My dad even managed to get off the bed in a sprightly manner and play the piano with him. He was so excited for days after that,” she adds.
