A. R. Rahman

A. R. Rahman
Allah-Rakha Rahman, born A. S. Dileep Kumar), is an Indian composer, singer-songwriter, music producer, musician and philanthropist. A. R. Rahman's works are noted for integrating Eastern classical music with electronic music, world music and traditional orchestral arrangements. Among his awards are two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, four National Film Awards, fifteen Filmfare Awards and thirteen Filmfare Awards South. Rahman's body of work for film and stage has given him the nickname of "the...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth6 January 1967
CountryIndia
When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.
My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality.
The best way would be education and kids and all that stuff and then education and working education comes through. Then I started a music school and the music school now teaches kids to play the violin and the viola.
These are the Rad (?) instruments that are dying out in India. So, it's going well and I think now we are increasing the number of kids we have taught and of course we are helping out with other things too. It's based in India now. [The idea is to] perfect it in one place and then we'll expand.
We didn't want to do that. It would have been a beautiful moment in the movie but it would have brought the movie down. So Danny's vision was perfect I think when he wanted it to be driven at the same time having this new emotion about this boy coming as a hallucination or like a déjà vu and as the future kid.
I usually work on a film soundtrack for two years, turning in a song every few months, and that keeps my creative energy high, because I'm constantly rotating projects. The trick is to make sure I don't work too hard and get exhausted.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
My mother insisted that I pursue music. I rented out my father's musical equipment and earned some money. As a child, I wasn't sure about a career goal, but I was always fascinated by electronic gadgets, specially musical equipment.
I think I can get away, sometimes, with walking in the streets and not getting noticed. I like that. I want my work to get noticed, not me. And it's slowly getting there, which is good.
I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind while doing something unrelated. You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.
I joined the Madras Christian College but dropped out after three months. Telugu music director Ramesh Naidu asked me to assist him, and I did so for over a year. I did think of rejoining college, but by then, I was discovering the musician in me. I worked with Illaya Raja and Raj Koti and soon shifted to commercials. This led to movie offers.
Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
I was famous from the age of 13, and after a while you become immune to it - in a good way. You look at positives and what you can do with it.
While my mother wanted me to be a musician, I wanted to become an electronic engineer.