Magazine| Mar 09, 2009



At Which Time Dilip Became Rahman

The Music and the Maker, the maestro's faith in Islam has found the twain makes for perfect consonance

SHEELA REDDY ON A.R. RAHMAN

  Meeting someone for an hour-long interview is no entry ticket to a man’s soul, but with A.R. Rahman it seemed like that. The first time I met him was in November ’98 when he’d come to Delhi to accept a Channel V viewers’ award for most popular track of the year. Some three million viewers had voted for him, which wasn’t surprising, considering how his music was already conquering the film world, both in Tamil and Hindi. But what was unusual was the song this post-Chitrahaar, Def Leppard-adoring generation chose as their favourite song of the year, Vande Mataram. By then, a countrywide row had broken out over the compulsory singing of this ‘national song’ in schools, but Rahman’s popular, flag-waving rendering of it (Maa Tujhe Salaam) was met everywhere, especially among the young, with foot-tapping enthusiasm. I had to find out for myself how this young man with Jesus Christ locks, blue jeans and Muslim name had so cleverly subverted the mullahs and the Hindu fundoos by getting a whole generation hooked to it.

That’s the best part of being a journalist, even a freelance one—you can go with a question to anyone, anywhere, and get your answer straight from the horse’s mouth. If you know how to reach it, of course. Rahman was easy—I just had to call the Channel V pro. Within hours, I was sitting in a hotel suite with this quiet young man with large, still eyes and hands, dressed all in black—black jacket, black trousers, black shoes—chatting not only about the genesis of his award-winning song (the brainchild of ad film buddy Bharatbala—they both wanted to create a song that would make patriotism hip). But as often happens in such moments of enforced intimacy, we ended up talking of much more. Such as how he converted to Islam 10 years earlier, when he was 21.

It started, he said, when his father was dying. Rahman was only 11 years old then, the middle child between two sisters. Having tried everything else and failed, the family turned to a local pir. "My father was very ill then, bed-ridden, and the pir sahib couldn’t do anything for him at that last stage." But even after his father died, Rahman’s family still turned to the pir for emotional support. And then one day, nearly 10 years later, the pir sahib came to Rahman’s home. "He blessed a room which is very special to me because my father died in it, and which I had turned into my studio. The pir sahib said we were destined to go through some unique experiences, including much suffering, and some very hard times." His prophecy had a curious effect on Rahman: "The moment he said that and blessed the room, I felt such peace. As if everything had become green, and my whole life had started afresh."

Within six months, the pir was dead, but the mystical power he had unleashed on the family lived on. That’s when Rahman says the family decided to embrace Islam. "I felt that, OK, this feeling that I have is God. It’s not about Hindu or Muslim or anything, but there is that one feeling, and that is God." It was not anything dramatic, he explained, "like it is in films".

"It would be hypocritical," he felt, with the dawning of this feeling, if he didn’t change his name. And so, Dilip Kumar became Allah Rakha Rahman at the age of 21. For Rahman and his family, the conversion was more a change in their attitude to God than anything else. "In fact," he pointed out, "if you take ancient Hindu scriptures, the Rig Veda, it says God is one." It’s the mystical aspects of the namaaz that he valued the most, Rahman said. "Prayer is more like a meditation for me. And it helps me clean my inner self. I go through death five times a day when I pray and I am born again. When I start, I feel I am dead and my soul has departed and when I finish my prayers I am back.I am born again."

Is it like that each time, I wanted to know. He laughed at my atheist’s curiosity. "I try to make it like that each time, but sometimes there is so much turmoil in the head, so much happening...." And what if he’s recording when it’s time for his prayers? "I have a small prayer room next to the studio, and my sister takes over the recording till my prayers are done." And if he’s travelling? "I carry my prayer mat wherever I go."

In all faith: with wife Saira

Did it make any difference, getting work as A.R. Rahman instead of Dilip Kumar? "In my field," he said, "it doesn’t matter whether you are Hindu or Muslim. If you are good, you stay; if you are bad, you get thrown out." On the other hand, he said, his new religion helped him get the right attitude to work: to keep his sense of balance and distance. "It’s your attitude in life that brings you success," he said. "So I’ve taken (from Islam) whatever helps me to get into that attitude." His music and Islam became inextricably linked together.

Interview over, Rahman started his own grilling. I was working then for a street children’s organisation and he wanted to know more. It’s written in the Quran, he said, that a person must donate one-third of his earnings to charity, and he was always on the lookout for deserving organisations he could send a donation to. Soon he left to catch a plane, and I forgot about the promise. Until several months later, when there was a call from his office in Chennai: could I please tell them who Mr Rahman should send a cheque to? The cheque arrived, I forget for how much—Rs 1 lakh, I think, or more. But what touched me most was that he should remember, and had taken the trouble.

We met again four years later. By then Rahman had film producers queueing up night and day at his state-of-the-art studio in Chennai, and was also a world celebrity, having worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Michael Jackson and J Lo. When we arrived at his hotel room, a pretty young woman was slipping out. "A girlfriend," guessed the photographer, experienced in the ways of celebrity lifestyles. "Probably a journalist," I said, not wanting the pir-like man I remembered to have gone the way of other film celebrities.

It was November ’02, possibly the worst time in independent India’s history to be a Muslim. The talk inevitably strayed to what it must be like to be a Muslim in these post-Gujarat riots time. But he had no regrets: "You can’t change your identity just because of politics," he told me wisely. "I am also a Tamilian—I can’t say, no, I won’t be a Tamilian because I may be mistaken for the LTTE."

He was still devoutly religious, insisting that it was what inspired his life and music. "Within religion’s boundaries, I am very free. It helps me to take success and failure in a balanced way, rather than jumping up and down or brooding."

The mystery woman returned, possibly because we were lingering for longer than either she or Rahman had anticipated. But he didn’t introduce her to us, and all of us complied silently with the rules of mental purdah that he set: pretending as if there was a wall between her and us.

But today, watching her walk the red carpet arm in arm with Rahman, I know who she is: his wife, Saira. And thank (his) God that he hasn’t changed.

For the past few days Mark Manuel, director, films, at JWT Chennai, has been drinking his morning cuppa from a magic mug. It’s magic because it displays an embossed photograph of him with AR Rahman, everytime a hot beverage is poured into it. It’s not very well known but the man they now call Rahman has a very strong and long connection with the ad-world, especially Chennai. Back then though he was known as AS Dileep Kumar.

Dileep’s involvement with advertising was no brief fling, but a full-fledged affair. Advertising is where the long epic journey that has culminated in an Oscar began when Dileep started scoring with background tunes for ads in the mid-1980s. In 1986, when a public service commercial on drug abuse was being produced at the Audio Vision studio in Chennai the studio owner, Vijay Modi suggested to Trilok Nair, director, Trisha Productions, that he must try out a young talent. “One could barely spot the boy behind the keyboards. But when we heard the music, we were blown away,” recalls Nair.

Within a short span, Dileep composed music for a number of brands like Leo Coffee, Nalli sarees, Hero Honda and Asian Paints. Suddenly this 20-something ‘little guy’ had everyone looking at the advertising backwater called Madras differently. Those who worked with him have many tales to tell. Like the one where one of his musical instruments starred in a commercial, without his knowledge. This was in an MRF commercial that showed the reflection of a synthesizer on the visor of the rider. That synth was ‘borrowed’ by film maker Bharat Bala from Dileep’s studio, when the composer was not around.

But life was not all roses for Dileep back then. On occasions, he got to see the downside of an industry unwilling to give new names a second look. One such example was a Gwalior suitings ad. Dileep had toiled for three full days working on the tune that would be ‘It’. While film maker and friend Rajiv Menon was convinced about the score, the client bounced the campaign and got Louis Banks, one of the more sought after names in the business redo it. “Advertising chases names. Now they must be kicking themselves hard,” recalls Menon, who teamed up with Rahman for several commercials including Fair & Lovely, Bru Coffee and the celebrated Asian Paints ‘Pongal’ commercial.

There were occasions though when film makers found a way to checkmate the client tantrums. For the Hero Honda Sleek campaign, Bharat Bala felt that the score composed by Louis Banks with Sivamani on percussion was not working. But the client and agency had approved it and to change their mind would be an uphill task. During one of Dileep’s late night sessions, Bala asked him for an option.

Three hours before the 9 am presentation, Bala got a ‘mind-blowing’ track. Of course, the client loved it, without knowing it was Dileep’s work. “Until recently I never confessed to this. The best part is the agency person never spotted the difference,” chuckles Bala. All those who worked with Dileep were dazzled by his willingness to experiment even in this genre. Nair reminisces about the Nalli Sarees client who wanted to make a commercial set to a famous old Tamil song. Dileep heard the client and suggested that they go in for a remix — remember that back then few were aware of remixing as a concept. “The client hemmed and hawed. But when they heard the final sound they couldn’t believe what they got,” says Nair. Such was the power of his tunes that some played on for years. Leo Coffee, one of the earliest ads, ran for 15 years and even when a new commercial was made about three years back, the music remained unchanged.

For ad men, Ashok Nagar, where Dileep had his home and studio, soon became the place to hang around. Colvyn Harris, CEO, JWT recalls spending several nights outside Rahman’s studio on that trademark Jhoola (swing), when the maestro was perfecting his art inside. “That swing has seen a lot of backsides, including Mani Ratnam’s,” jokes Nair. Harris also remembers the day when film maker Bharat Bala dragged him and his family out to a waiting car and made him listen to his album, Vande Mataram. “I was among the first people to listen to Vande Mataram.” says Harris 

Ad men even played bit roles in shaping the destiny of Dileep’s career, or even life. A classmate from school, Bharat Bala rediscovered his old friend after he began making ad films; Rajiv Menon became the best man at his wedding; while Trilok Nair who happens to be Mani Ratnam’s brother-in-law introduced Dileep to the hotshot director. Among the several works that the extremely-hard-to-impress Ratnam reviewed before Dileep was signed on for Roja was the Leo Coffee commercial, which incidentally featured Arvind Swamy, who went on to play the lead role in the film after the original choice, ad film maker Rajiv Menon declined to be the hero. The world may know him as Rahman, but it was advertising that first uncovered the little genius called Dileep.

This review from wirebeats.com summarizes the album well  for me. It probably one of ARR most eclectic and experimental albums. One of his finest work (esp the instrumental pieces if you ask me). Check it out. BN.

http://wiredbeats.com/2009/01/a-review-rahmans-new-album-connections/ 

A Review - Rahman’s new album - Connections

by admin on January 24, 2009

Last few months has been raining AR Rahman. Great music  ,Golden Globe Awards and Oscar Nominations. We have heard the western classical renditions in Yuvaraaj,peppy teen tracks on Jaane Tu.., commercial masala in Gajini and fusion in Slumdog Millionaire.

We now have  the awesome variety in Delhi-6. However, I am not going to talk about Delhi 6.It has a ‘must buy’ tag on it already. Let me divert your attention to a hidden treasure in Rahman’s new album – Connections.

Available (for now) exclusively in Nokia X-press music phones, Connections is a full-fledged album by AR Rahman. I am hopeful that soon this will be available in standard CDs in stores.

‘Connections’ is unlike anything you have heard from AR Rahman. Really, unlike anything. This time AR goes spiritual and solace is the theme of the album. If you love Lounge by Prem Joshua, Kauresh and the likes, you will simply love Rahman’s Connections! This is mind-numbingly superb album that calms you, makes your brain cooler and infuses positive energy.

Heres my take

Himalaya – A solo grand piano performance interlaced with pads so perfect that you know the mood of the album is ‘Positive’ and unyielding love for others. The sustaining piano in the same range is pure peace spilled all over. Wow!

Jiya Se Jiya – This is sort of sweet speed breaker! Full on percussions and loud performance asking us to offer ‘free hugs’ to one and all and spread love across man kind. The video of track features Rahman and the people from the ‘Free Hug campaign. (www.freehugscampaign.org) . Nice peppy track..

Kural – This is god. Rahman at one point did speak of mixing Thirukural in a manner that reintroduces the divine Tamil text to modern day youth. Rahman has used the hymns of Thirukural and layered it soft English spoken words by Blaaze re-iterating the attribute of respect over fame and money. Kural has the artist recite the 97th chapter of Thirukural – Maanam ( Tamil for respect/Dignity) where it says - Honor and Respect supersedes any material gain. The song is very very deep and insightful. Do find more on this track at the end of this post.

Man Chandre – Beautifully rendered, Man Chandre is an Indian ballad. Sweet, smooth and comforting. However, AR has done a few numbers like these in his films

Mosquito - Funny in its name, the track is actually very serious. The long riffs of Sarang(I think) is interrupted often to create that mosquito effect! Very interesting. If you are into Indian classical, this is for you.

Mylapore Blues –Mylapore is a very important place in Chennai. There is so much history and intellect in that place of the town. This Indian blues track is a mix of mridangam and blues! Interesting huh, hear it and you will be amazed. You need to have an ear for variety to appreciate. If you are into peppy commercial music, forget this track. You want to kick back in the evening and just ease –off then buy this.

Silent Invocation –A,B and C - This is a three part track with nothing but flute and mild bass lines. This is a mega meditative track. Long enough to make you think deep inside of your persona, or even empty your chaotic mind from worldly thoughts. Silent Invocation is Rahman at his spiritual best and does it work or what! Close your eyes, relax and find yourself at peace.Real peace.

A.R. Rahman - Connections (2009)

 

“Jiya Se Jiya”. Video.

February 24, 2009

Starless Movie’s Starry Night

By DAVID CARR

WEST HOLLYWOOD — There were plenty of happy faces at the Governors Ball on Sunday night, right after the Oscars. Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, the men who produced the show, stood near the center of the room, soaking up compliments about their efforts, while Sean Penn made time for a stream of well-wishers.

Out in the lobby there were yet more questions and photos for many of the winners, including a few who were up past their bedtimes. The kids from “Slumdog Millionaire,” flown in just a few days before from India, moved as a posse, and the director Danny Boyle placed the statue on Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail’s head for one photo and took turns holding it with the others. He said that although he had managed the children on screen, “I am not going to be the one to tell them it’s time to go to bed.”

It was a little grimmer at some of the tables where studio executives worked their way through dinner and an evening dominated by a little film shot in India that none of them wanted. Tender as it was, the slow-braised short rib must have seemed a little on the chewy side: there is nothing nice to say about being a bystander at your own party.

Although the triumph of “Slumdog Millionaire” had been writ for most of the season — it won eight Oscars over all, including best picture, director and adapted screenplay — it was still breathtaking to see a starless, partly subtitled film from halfway around the world sneak past so many carefully confected and well-financed studio efforts.

Despite all the planning and guile of production executives, directors, producers and marketing executives, movie magic is still something that occurs in the space between the audience and the screen at the front of the room.

American film is one of the last remaining exports, a kind of bejeweled software that the rest of the world clearly loves. More than half of the money American movies make at the box office comes from elsewhere in the world, and given the downward trajectory of DVD sales domestically, those global markets are only going to grow in importance.

But global imperatives go both ways. When a film with a British director, Indian actors and French co-financing goes home with eight Oscars, it’s hard not to see a message.

“I think it demonstrates that a good story well told, whether it is about someone in Mumbai, China or around the corner, will find an audience,” said Nancy Utley, chief operating officer at Fox Searchlight, the division of 20th Century Fox that found Oscar (and box office) gold after picking up “Slumdog Millionaire.” She added that the studio specialty division knew it had a winner on its hands when it screen-tested the film in Orange County, Calif. — sort of a ground zero of a conventional American audience — without any marketing or explanation, and the room loved it.

On the way in to the Kodak Theater on the red carpet, Mr. Boyle said there was no way to game your way to an audience. You have to make something worthy, he said, and then hope for lightning to strike.

“The cinema has to always be able to come up with a surprise, to do something that is unexplained, to do something that none of us expected,” Mr. Boyle said. “That’s why what is happening with this movie is exciting for the whole industry. We still have got to be able to surprise.”

Of course surprise is just another name for risk, and studios working into a recession where financing is tough to come by need to find as many sure things as possible. The ascendance of “Slumdog” comes at an awkward time in other ways.

Studios like Paramount and Warner Brothers have downsized or eliminated their divisions for smaller films, crippling the apparatus that enables talented directors and aggressive producers to create challenging work. The big studios are best at making movies with established stars or concepts, and then pounding them into public consciousness with blunt-force marketing.

When Warner Brothers found itself with “Slumdog Millionaire” (the studio had closed the indie division that owned the rights), it quickly realized it didn’t have the expertise to market a small movie, one whose audience needs to be nurtured over time. Warner then turned to Fox Searchlight.

After the box office success of “Juno,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Slumdog,” it is clear that Fox Searchlight is making its own luck. But because there are fewer options, it is the de facto first stop for a certain kind of smaller movie.

Yet there remains a maddening alchemy to this business of making movies that refuses to be pinned down. You can be a complete hero on one weekend and tagged as an idiot the next.

Think about it. People were laughing up their sleeves at Warner Brothers for letting go of “Slumdog.” But those same Warner executives took the Batman franchise and gave it to a talented director (Chris Nolan) who reinvented it by painting with a very dark palette and an even darker view of human nature.

“The Dark Knight” just passed a billion dollars. And those geniuses at Fox and Fox Searchlight? Keep in mind that they passed on “Slumdog” in the first place and spent much of the past year on a can’t-miss, star-infested, Oscar-confected movie called “Australia,” a film that was so bereft, come awards time, that its star, Hugh Jackman, had to host the Oscars to earn a seat. (He told that joke on himself Sunday night, to big laughs.)

Over the past few years the Oscars have been kidnapped by independent productions and foreign stars and directors, leading some to whine that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has become too tasteful for its own good. But when Hollywood executives look at the winners’ circle, what they are really seeing is a reflection of their better selves.

The mash-up between Bollywood and the classic Hollywood conjured by Mr. Condon and Mr. Mark worked — ratings were up 13 percent, to 36.3 million viewers, over last year’s miserable performance — because while “Slumdog” might have been conjured elsewhere, its DNA is Hollywood to the core. A big chase to start, lots of star-crossed love in between, and a hug at the end, including a dance number that would not have been out of place at the Kodak last night.

And there’s more where that came from. The winner of the documentary short category, “Smile Pinki,” was filmed in India as well. Working the carpet, I spent time making nice with its young subject, Pinki Sonkar, radiant after a cleft palate repair and a film about her journey. At the end of the interview with her and the film’s director, Megan Mylan, I awkwardly folded my hands together at my chin and bowed, as I had when the kids of “Slumdog” came through.

“I’m going to have to learn how to do that,” said a reporter next to me. It will be clumsy for everyone. Hollywood’s efforts to globalize its content as well as its business have been a train wreck for the most part, but for a stagnant industry under duress at home, the rest of the world is waiting for their stories to be told as well

Posted February 23, 2009 | 12:22 PM (EST)

How Godzilla Helped Slumdog Sweep the Oscars

Read More: 2009 Academy Awards, 2009 Oscars, Akira Kurosawa, Danny Boyle, Danny Boyle Slumdog Millionaire, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Godzilla, Slumdog Millionaire, Slumdog Millionaire Best Picture, The Academy Awards, The Oscars, Toho, Entertainment News

There are a lot of individuals to thank for Slumdog Millionaire's eight Academy Awards and its best picture win, but the biggest is a stories-high radioactive reptile with an extreme distaste for Tokyo.

Yes, Godzilla. Without him, most foreign films wouldn't make it past customs. Few could have imagined the impact Godzilla: King of the Monsters would have had when it was released here in 1956, but a half-century later it's the most important foreign film in American history.

Crude as it was, Godzilla unlocked foreign film for even the most slackjawed of American filmgoers. Sure, they had to chop it up, re-dub the whole thing, and add Raymond Burr long after the film was wrapped, but Godzilla took its nuclear breath to the cultural obstacles (lingering racism and resentment following World War II, a long and storied national history of xenophobia, etc.) preventing meat-and-potatoes, movie-watchin' Midwesterners from enjoying Metropolis, La Strada, Grand Illusion and nearly every other subtitled foreign standard.

It all begins with a simple, transcendent idea: A big monster crushing a big city. Godzilla was the post-World War II, post-nuclear Japanese culture's coming out party, with its ravenous monster, terrified populace, and emotional center: the upstaged, eyepatch-wearing Dr. Daisuke Serizawa. Godzilla may get all the glory, but Serizawa did all the emotional heavy lifting. See, the one-eyed scientist invented an "oxygen destroyer" that could stop the monster, but won't use it for fear of going down as Japan's version of Robert Oppenheimer.

The film doesn't come together during Godzilla's big attack on Tokyo, but when a children's choir sings for Tokyo's dead. Hearing this, Serizawa resolves to give his own life to save Japan from further suffering and Godzilla ceases to be a silly monster movie. It's not about the damn monster at all, but about the pathos and suffering of an entire people.

Like many foreign films, Godzilla was initially misunderstood -- American critics couldn't look past the cheap theatrics. (The New York Times panned the film, saying, "As though there are not enough monsters coming from Hollywood, an organization that calls itself Jewell Enterprises has had to import one from Japan.")

Like tin-foil planes on strings, the insults bounced off Godzilla, as Jewell Enterprises' $100,000 lease of the film from Toho Pictures turned into a $2 million run at the box office. A monster was born -- along with the business model that still drives foreign films today. (In 2008 dollars, Jewell's initial investment was $790,000 against a gross of $15.8 million, proving that decidedly cult films could make big bucks, even if they didn't make the mainstream.)

While Godzilla entered the American consciousness one Saturday afternoon TV matinee at a time, it literally bankrolled the Japanese film industry. The film was an immediate hit in Japan and Toho moved to capitalize, licensing Godzilla and his monster buddies for comic books, cartoons, video games, and apparel. Flush with cash, Toho used the money to not only fund the films of Akira Kurosawa, but also all of Miyazaki's anime work and the Pokemon movies, too.

In the decades to come, foreign films became a staple side dish at the American box office. From couples watching the romantic French-fantasy Amelie in the suburbs to stoned-out college students passing out to Godzilla's thematic anime cousin Akira in their dorms, there are few foreign film fans who don't fall within the big lizard's footprint. That includes Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, who has followed the Godzilla blueprint better than anyone in decades.

Boyle started with a simple, transcendent idea: Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? By making the Regis-deprived game and its contestant the main focus, he tied in elements of Indian culture (including sectarian violence, caste discrimination, crippling poverty and a booming Mumbai) before the audience is able to give its final answer. The game and the events surrounding each question nearly destroy the man playing it, but he fights on and keeps living to play another day.

No, Slumdog doesn't have a giant monster. There aren't cheesy toy planes and radioactive breath. It won't lead to decades of appalling sequels and billions of dollars worth of merchandising. It did, however, benefit from the seemingly simple fare that came before and offered many Americans their first look at a culture other than their own.

And all this time you thought Godzilla was just another guy in a rubber suit.

‘Slumdog’ Cleans Up at the Oscars

Chris Carlson/Associated Press

“Slumdog Millionaire” won eight Oscars, including the prize for best picture, at the 81st annual Academy Awards on Sunday.

NYT Photo Feature

Anil Kapur in conversation with Shekar Gupta on “Walk The Talk”.

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Rakhee-Meghna delight on Gulzar's win

24 Feb 2009, 0000 hrs IST, Priyanka Dasgupta, TNN

"My husband is the best"
The whole of India is celebrating Gulzar saab's Oscar win. What's your reaction?
He is the most deserving. My husband is the best. I'm so happy that at his age, his mind is still so alert. Since the nominations were announced, there were doubts about whether he ought to go to the awards ceremony. He called me up and we discussed what he ought to do. He mentioned that our daughter, Meghna, had wanted him to go. Since I understood that he still wasn't very convinced, I said it was completely up to him to decide on what he wanted to do. The Oscars are not just for Gulzar or Rahman. It's an honour for India. As far as I remember, the other Indians to have won it were Satyajit Ray and Bhanu Athaiya. Of course, every award is important. But then, there is something about the Oscars and Nobel Prize that make them stand apart from the rest. It's definitely a very happy moment for us.

How have the celebrations been at home?
We are a very close-knit family — my husband, daughter and son-in-law. We had a quiet dinner before the Oscar night. While there will be a whole lot of well-wishers congratulating him, I know he'll love to do his own work. He plays tennis and has injured his wrist. So, when I first called him up, he said he was going for his physiotherapy. Despite the win, he remains as normal as he always is. Neche geye party kori na amra (We don't sing and dance to celebrate). There is a Bengali proverb that says: Jar biye hush nei, para porshir ghum nei! That's exactly the case here.

What's it about Gulzar saab's lyrics that you appreciate?
His recent lyrics make use of a lot of colloquial words without being obscene. I still find poetry in them. He never compromises on the aesthetic quality of the lyrics. In fact, there have been times when he refused to dilute his lyrics after producers wanted him to write certain things. Even when he refused, I've never seen him disappointed.

Though it's a difficult choice, could you pick your favourite line from Gulzar saab's songs?
Tujh se naraz nahin zindagi...

Why doesn't one get to see you doing films these days?
While change is inevitable, I don't wish to do a film only for the sake of doing one. Today, people are talking to me because of the kind of work that I've done. I can't pick up any role and disappoint the expectations they have from me. I've always taken up a role judging the project in totality. I am grateful to Rituparno Ghosh for giving me that role in Shubho Mahurat.

Don't you ever wish that Gulzar saab had directed you too?
No. I never have that regret. I've usually been part of every project that he has done. But the honest confession is that I never wanted a situation where there would be a compulsion in him to cast me since I'm his wife. As a matter of fact, that kind of compulsion is a handicap for a director. I've seen that happen in cases where the husband and wife have been cast opposite each other in films. I prefer the vacuum of not being cast, though I've acted in films written by him.

Ever considered acting in your daughter's film?
Yes. My daughter says that I'll scold her if I'm on the sets. But I say that I'll be a thorough professional. On the sets, she will be my director and I, her actor.

Don't you miss acting?
Not really. Most of my time is spent in my farmhouse that's about 60 miles from Mumbai. I am interested in agriculture and I guess, it's an interest I inherited from my father. I've been reading up a lot on how to improve cultivation in areas that have scarcity of water. I keep travelling to universities to learn about the latest techniques. During summers, I'll be going down to the Haringhata College of agriculture too. All this takes up so much of time that I hardly miss acting now.

'The suit's on its way from Maganlal dresswallah'
That's what Gulzar would say when asked what he would wear to the Oscars. And that's just a hint of the man's phenomenal sense of humour, which, daughter Meghna says, few know about

Have you decided on how you'd want to celebrate?
This is a great day for all Indians. But ever since the nominations were announced, my father was going about it very normally. His reactions were very tempered. And that, kind of seeped into us too. On Monday morning, when we got the news, the dam burst! My father has been very cool. When I called up, he initially said he needed to take a bath first. With him being where he is, this award is a lot bigger for us. Would you believe that half the time I don't even know what he is doing? People tell me that he is doing something and that's how I often get to find out.

Which songs of his are your favourite?
That's a difficult choice. But I'd go for Tujhe naraz nahin zindagi... I also like all the songs from Andhi. And of course, there is the title track from my own film. The reason for choosing that is more subjective than objective. There is such a different feel to whatever subject my father is writing on. Even songs on anger or heartbreak have this fragile quality.

Don't you ever wish you had featured in his films?
My father has always said that it's difficult for him to dissociate his wife from the actor that she is. When I was assisting him for Maachis, there was a suicide scene of Tabu where we needed to show her having a haemorrhage. He couldn't accept Tabu bleeding to death. So, I know how difficult it would be if I were to act in a film. Even while assisting, I found that he would always be very concerned about what I was doing. My presence turned into a distraction.

Could you share anything about Gulzar saab that the world doesn't know much about?
I've written a lot about him in my book. People, I find, are usually in awe of him and are often hesitant to approach him. In reality, he is very soft and emotional. It's a typical Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde kind of a personality, though nothing of it has been engineered. For every person, there is a private and a public self. So it is with my father. He has a tremendous sense of humour that few are aware of. When the Oscar nominations were made, he was constantly being asked what he would wear to the ceremony. People were also talking about whether the world would finally get to see him in a suit. Though he had no plans of going, he told people: 'The suit is on its way from Maganlal dresswallah!" And he said all of it with a straight face! On Sunday night over dinner, he told us about a recent trip to Lucknow, where he had asked two cameramen whether the Oscar awards would allow him entry if he chose to wear shirts in stripes or checks. The two lensmen, who were wearing similar shirts, engaged in a serious debate on why he wouldn't be allowed entry, should he decide to wear the same to the Oscars!

Don't you wish he was there on stage to receive the awards?
He has no regrets. He has been travelling a lot. He gets very flustered if he doesn't get time to write. The recent months have been very exhausting for him.

Wouldn't you want to cast your mother in your film?
Some day, when I'm confident as a director, that too will happen. Right now, I'm in the casting stages of two projects.

Interesting what google will turn up.

In the course of looking for a picture for this article I stumbled across these pictures on picassa of gulzar releasing a copy of a book on him at his house. It s a very interesting set of rather candid pictures of him. Do take a look.

http://picasaweb.google.com/vvpadalkar/GangaAayeKanhase#

http://picasaweb.google.com/vvpadalkar/GulzarAtNanded#

AR Rahman: Global tunesmith

Indian music director AR Rahman's score for Slumdog Millionaire has won an Oscar for best music, and a second for best song. The BBC's Soutik Biswas discusses what makes Rahman tick.

The curiously named Panchathan Record Inn is a nondescript building tucked away in the thriving film district of the southern Indian city of Madras (Chennai). The backyard music studio is also AR Rahman's atelier.

"We make a lot of noise here," one of Rahman's assistants told me wryly when I paid a visit a few years ago. It was late in the evening, and trombone loops floated down the stairs from the state-of-the art studio above.

The "noise" has now conquered the world.

Seventeen years after he began writing music and songs for films, the jingle maker-turned-musician has finally got recognition as India's first truly global film music composer with his score for Danny Boyle's sleeper hit Slumdog Millionaire.

The score is an untidy smorgasbord of hip hop, Bollywood remix and signature pop anthem. But it works because it follows the film's giddy pace, the darkness of its characters, its portrayal of lives on the edge.

Bollywood outsider

The golden statue is a global recognition of Rahman's enormous talent.

Like many film composers, he is not a particularly gifted vocalist or a player. Rahman, instead, is an alchemist of sounds and voices, mixing and melting them in a potion that is usually a joy for the ear and soul.

“ Rahman is an alchemist of sounds and voices ”

It is not surprising then that he is a composer with a staggering range - from raga to reggae to hip hop to Indian rustbelt folk to jungle rhythms to faux baroque. All of it is brewed with an unerring feel for melody, swing and soul.

Rahman, who converted to Islam some 20 years ago, is also India's- and Bollywood's- first truly successful crossover music director.

Bollywood has filched tunes from the West for as long as I can remember - check out rip-offs from Chuck Berry, The Beatles, swing jazz and vapid disco for many home-grown hit tunes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. But Rahman is not your archetypal tune ripper; he is, instead, an intrepid fusion tunesmith.

It helps that he remains the outsider in Bollywood - the world's most incestuous film industry.

Rahman cut his teeth scoring music for southern Indian films in the Telegu and Tamil languages, before scoring for Bollywood. Even this year, he is working on several Tamil and Telegu films, and only two Hindi films.

And that is one of the reasons why the 43-year-old composer has often reached out to little-known new singers and musicians from all over the country to lend their voices and instruments to his songs and score.

Rahman is also globalisation's favourite child, always abreast of the world music that is making waves. No wonder he discovered the music of MIA, aka Maya Arulpragasam, the war child turned feisty alternative rapper, who very few people in India had heard before Slumdog.

Rahman uses MIA's Paper Planes - the singer rapping over a compelling sample riff and a rousing chorus line with gunshots and cash registers jingling in the background - in Slumdog.

"We met before but we never worked before," he told one interviewer. "MIA, she's a real powerhouse. Somebody played me her CD and I thought, who is this girl? She came here and knew all my work, had followed my work for ages. I said cut the crap, this 'idol' crap. You have to teach me. We started working in India, then we e-mailed the track back and forth. She did the vocals in England, I did the rest in India."

Mixing old and new

I am now not surprised that the gritty girl rapper and the reclusive composer bonded so well. I met MIA a couple of years ago on the Jamaica seafront where she was shooting a music video for a new album. The boom box was playing her new song, a noisy mish-mash of what sounded like raucous Tamil gaana - a form of Tamil fast beat slum rap - over hip hop grooves. The Sri Lanka-born Tamil MIA and Rahman share some of the same culture. 

For the Slumdog score, Rahman says he was mixing the sounds of new and old India. But Slumdog is not even among his top five scores.

The songs and score for Roja (The Rose), a 1992 film directed by Mani Ratnam, is possibly his best and most consistent work to date.

A limpid fusion of raga and reggae, Roja was a breathtaking achievement for a composer taking his first steps in the intensely competitive world of Indian film music.

Working with a number of vocalists, the film's music showcases his talents - fusing flutes, synthesisers and traditional melody to a reggae backbeat and a rolling bass line. Sometimes it felt like listening to The Wailers - Bob Marley's iconic reggae band - playing to Indian vocals. Time magazine called it one of the top 10 movie soundtracks of all time.

From then on, there has been no stopping the Rahman revolution in Indian film music, his best work usually coming with Mani Ratnam, an MBA-turned-filmmaker.

On the Ratnam movie, Bombay, on love and longing in a city torn apart by religious rioting, Rahman's offerings are again rich and varied - from a sweaty, breathless love song by Remo Fernandes to a child chorus ditty to a background score that highlights the bleakness of a city and its people broken by hatred and fighting.

And then, just to pick two films, come the pulsating baroque tunes and sounds in Ratnam's Thiruda Thiruda (Thief, thief) - my favourite Rahman soundtrack.

From there, Rahman travels to fusing swing jazz and smoky blues with pristine Carnatic classical in the political hero biopic, Iruvar, another Ratnam film.

There have been many good soundtracks and songs before and after these two films.

In the end, Rahman, like the best of Indian film music composers, is melody's slave. At his place we had discussed the possibility of a rap musical some day. "I don't think," the alchemist frowned, "rap could sustain a two-hour musical!"

If you would like to send a comment about this story you can use the form below.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7894174.stm
Published: 2009/02/23 03:56:40 GMT
© BBC MMIX

February 21, 2009

‘Slumdog’ Fusionist in Oscar Spotlight

By BEN SISARIO

A. R. Rahman knows how big a deal it would be if he wins an Oscar on Sunday.

One of the most prolific and successful film composers in India, he has three nominations, all for “Slumdog Millionaire”: best original score and best original song, for both “Jai Ho” and “O ... Saya,” a collaboration with the Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A. (The film, by Danny Boyle, has 10 nominations, and last month Mr. Rahman won a Golden Globe for best score.)

“It would be a great honor,” Mr. Rahman said with characteristic diffidence in a phone interview this week from Los Angeles, where he was preparing to perform at the ceremony. “It would help me to do bigger things.”

Ask him what those bigger things might be, however, and he grows even quieter. Naming some Western directors he would like to work with, he sounds distracted, almost bored, as if the future is just too abstract to worry about.

“Baz Luhrmann,” he said. A beat, then: “Ridley Scott. I’m a big fan of Ridley.”

But when it comes to his music Mr. Rahman, who is 43 but with his cherubic cheeks could pass for less than 30, turns surprisingly chatty. His work has been in more than 100 films since 1992, and after scoring Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bollywood-themed stage musical “Bombay Dreams” in 2002 he enjoyed had a steadily growing profile in the West. One of the first major composers in India to embrace digital technology, he is in his natural habitat at the computer, and he maintains the manic, multitasking rhythm of a true 21st-century techie.

“I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind, while doing something unrelated,” he said. “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.”

Productivity, along with a gift for golden melody and a cosmopolitan touch that reflects the new, globally conscious India, have given Mr. Rahman, who lives and works in Chennai (the city formerly known as Madras), a kind of national-hero status. “Rah Rah Rahman,” The Times of India proclaimed on its front page after the Oscar nominations were announced.

“He has a rapper from Tanzania working with him,” Mr. Boyle said, “and fulfilled a mutual desire to work with M.I.A., part Sri Lankan, part London, part New York. Add the house-music disco beats sweeping Bollywood dance lately and you have a real moment of fusion.”

Mr. Rahman works on five or six films a year, juggling several at a time in various stages of completion. While unheard of in Hollywood, that pace is common in India, and Mr. Rahman has made his share of modern classics, like “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India” (2001), beloved by Indian and Western critics alike, and “Dil Se” (1998).

“Slumdog,” Mr. Rahman said, was created in relatively luxurious circumstances: “I kept three weeks aside. I moved to London and did the whole score there.”

Even by the musical-sponge standards of Indian film, Mr. Rahman has been an especially curious fusionist. The son of a film composer, R. K. Shekhar, he grew up with a record collection that included Indian music and rock; two favorites were the American country singer Jim Reeves and Walter Carlos’s landmark electronic album “Switched-On Bach.” (Born A. S. Dileep Kumar, he changed his name to Allah Rakkha Rahman when he converted to Sufi Islam in his early 20s.)

Mr. Rahman was playing professional sessions by age 11 and soon had a rock band. He received a scholarship to the Trinity College of Music in London, and upon his return to India began composing commercial jingles. His first film was “Roja,” and his sophisticated approach quickly revolutionized Indian film music, said David Novak, an ethnomusicologist at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

“He’s sort of the Peter Gabriel of the Indian film industry,” Mr. Novak said. “He shifted things from a simple East-West mode to a multicultural, global mode, where India and its regional musics are part of a palette of sound from around the world.”

Mr. Rahman’s crossover to Western audiences has not come without bumps. “Bombay Dreams” was a success in the West End, but on Broadway it closed in eight months and never recouped its $14 million investment.

“I’ve long been impressed by his talent, and I’m so pleased that Hollywood has recognized it,” Mr. Lloyd Webber said. “I’m just disappointed that Broadway didn’t get it when he and I did ‘Bombay Dreams’ there.”

An Oscar would certainly raise Mr. Rahman’s profile in Hollywood, and commentators in India and in the West have said that recognition for “Slumdog” could help legitimize India’s film talent in general. Only two Indians have received Academy Awards: Bhanu Athaiya won in 1983 for best costume design in “Gandhi,” and the director Satyajit Ray was given a lifetime achievement award shortly before he died in 1992.

But Mr. Rahman said he does not view the awards as a referendum on Bollywood, and indeed wasn’t getting his hopes up about the contests, in which his competitors include Mr. Gabriel, Danny Elfman and James Newton Howard.

He didn’t have an acceptance speech ready, he said, and his days in Los Angeles before the awards were packed with activity, including a performance of “Jai Ho” on “The Tonight Show” on Thursday, meetings with various directors and record labels, and filming the video of a Pussycat Dolls remix of “Jai Ho.”

“I like to work fast,” he said.

Magazine| Jan 12, 2009

essay

The Soil Beckons

The years in other cities have only strengthened my sense of belonging to my roots in Assam

ARNAB GOSWAMI

When the view from the aircraft window changes from the soft green of distant paddy fields to the deeper green of Kamrup’s forests, I know I’m home. As I step out of Guwahati’s Gopinath Bordoloi airport, the humid rain-scented air, like Proust’s madeleines, unlocks a flood of memories. The road from the airport into town goes past the flat where I rode my first tricycle, and the air force nursery school where I felt so lost on my first day. My father was in the army, and was on a home posting as garrison engineer of the Borjhar Air Force station, some 15 km from the edge of the Guwahati city. And though it’s been well over three decades, I remember, too, the drive to my grandfather’s sprawling house in Bharalumukh, on the Assam Trunk Road. We would drive past Nilachal Hill on which the Kamakhya Mandir is perched, and through my four-year-old eyes, everything would look larger than life. The Brahmaputra would seem like an ocean (it still does), the gardens like football fields and the nameplate bearing my paternal grandfather’s name "Rajani Kanta Goswami, Pleader" would seem worthy of being read again and again, till I made myself believe that one day, I too would have a nameplate of my own.

Homeward Bound: Bharalumukh against the backdrop of the Nilachal Hills

My native place, for me, is a series of images haphazardly placed, but evoking the same sentiments each time I play them through my mind. I rewind, pause and fast forward as I wish, and my mind takes me to and fro faster than I wish.

Memories of Guwahati are inextricably linked with my maternal grandfather, Gaurisankar Bhattacharya, and his rugged and austere approach to life. A devout Communist and intellectual, he was, in his time, Guwahati’s most celebrated jurist. His library had a smell of its own. It was dark and lined with the most eclectic range of books that I had ever seen—from legal tomes and all the publications of the People’s Publishing House to American paperbacks and the best of Herge. "This boy has to be exposed to the Assamese outdoors," he would tell my mother, as he put on his gumboots to take me in his 1967 black Ambassador on a fishing expedition to his farm and pond in the heart of Guwahati. He would lay the nets himself, go into the muddy water, and hold up for me the biggest rohu he had caught. After that he would laughingly pull the leeches off his legs. I once dared to ask him, "Why do you do all this—go into the mud, and let the leeches crawl on your leg, when you can buy all the fish you want?"

He looked reflective for a moment, and then answered, "So that I don’t forget my roots." Those immortal words have said stayed with me to this day.

If I calculate hard, it strikes me now that I have not spent more than fifteen per cent of my living days in Assam. And yet, it seems even more my native place today than it did when I was in school or college. In a strange and inexplicable way, I find myself identifying more with local issues and concerns than I did earlier. Is it because I want to deny the rootlessness of the years spent between fifteen different cities in India and abroad? Frankly, I don’t know. But as I grow older, my own definition of my native place has also begun to expand.

I remember the year I spent living in a 200 sq ft room on a terrace in Calcutta’s Keyatala Lane. I was straight out of Oxford, starting my career as a journalist with The Telegraph, didn’t speak a word of Bengali, and lived a carefree life between Haldirams, Flurys, Blue Fox, the then brand new Metro, the always smoke-filled edit department, the cheap pirated cassette shops on Freeschool Street and the Allahabad Bank branch near Park Street, where I felt loaded every time I withdrew Rs 200 after standing in a sweaty line for half an hour.It’s the shortest career stint I had, and in less than a year I had left to be a TV journalist in Delhi. But in that very short period, I developed an affection and a bond with Calcutta so strong that I found it difficult to explain to myself. Where else would you have a conversation on a book you were carrying with an absolute stranger on a bus, find a colleague desperately writing poetry in an oven of a room on a summer afternoon, and establish a strange rapport with the owner of the Ganguram sweet shop in Gol Park that went beyond the free ‘shingaras’?

Arnab, standing right, with his grandfather

And so, in my own mind, my roots began to spread, linking me to Calcutta as well. One obvious link was to Calcutta University, where my uncle and grandfather studied law, but another link was to the beautiful small flat of Bhupen Hazarika on Golf Club Road, and I would experience a thrill every time I went there. His voice, deep-throated and nasal at the same time, became for me the voice of my native land. A legend in Assam and an icon in Calcutta, he became my role model for the multicultural identity that I too wanted. I can still hear his voice, shouting out for my father on a late Saturday evening in Fort William. "Colonel, where’s the whisky? I’m here!" he would say, standing arms akimbo on the porch below.

If I were to draw a visual montage of my native land and lay an audio track over it, it would be largely made up of my grandfathers’ homes in Guwahati along with corners of Calcutta, and Bhupen Hazarika singing about the great rivers of the east, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga, in Assamese and Bengali at the same time. The montage would have to end with the one track that he immortalised for millions, from the Paul Robeson original Ol’ Man River. When my father asked him to sing Ganga Bahti Ho Kyun twenty-five years ago at our house, I hadn’t heard Robeson’s original song about the Mississippi. When I did, it moved me to the core. Two voices, so different, and yet so much in love with the lands their rivers run through.

(Arnab Goswami is the editor-in-chief of Times Now.)

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Magazine| Jan 12, 2009

Essay

Mountain-Spirited Kumaon and its people are forever a watercolour memory, much like its mild sunlight

PRASOON JOSHI

Time: 7:02 am; Place: B&B cottage, Assisi, Italy

A Peaceful morning, sitting under a tree on a comfortable chair, a cup of tea warming my hands, and I suddenly hear that unmistakable sound—ku-ku-ku, ku ku. Just the cooing of a bird, but suddenly I am filled with deep warmth, and am transported miles away, decades into the past.
When I was eight or nine, in Almora, a small town in Uttarakhand in the Himalayas, wandering in the woods collecting pine fruit, the sound of "ku-ku-ku, ku ku" ringing in my ears mixed with the gentle voice of my nani, recounting a story about this bird.
A young Pahadi woman, married off in a faraway village, eagerly awaits a visit from her beloved dadda—her brother—who is arriving for bhaiduj. He would be walking hours and hours, as is common in the mountains, to get to his sister's house. Starting at the crack of dawn, he'd leave on an empty stomach and, as per custom, only eat after his sister has adorned his forehead with a tika. Meanwhile, his sister, exhausted with the day's hard work, waits, and after a while, slips into a slumber. On arriving, the brother looks affectionately at his younger sister in her light sleep, tenderly draws up a blanket to her chin, caresses her forehead and, not wanting to steal a few minutes of her much-deserved rest, leaves. After a while, the sister awakens and on figuring out that her brother had come and gone, weeps inconsolably, saying, "My brother came, he must have been so tired, so hungry. And I kept sleeping!" She feels this pain and guilt so deeply that she dies yearning for her brother. The legend goes that it is she who is reincarnated as the ghughuti bird, and when she coos, what she says is: "Ghughuti basuti, baeh bhuk go main sooti (...my brother went away hungry and I kept on sleeping)."
For me, this story personifies the simplicity and innocence of the people who live in Kumaon, a place where silence sings, where every faint sound is heard—the sound of the gushing waterfall far away, the falling of a leaf, the patter of raindrops, the crunch of a wet branch underfoot, the call of a bird.

Small-town bustle: The old market of Almora

As a writer and poet, I owe much to the mountains where I grew up. Though by that same sentiment, I absorb and appreciate the character of different kinds of places. For instance, I see a big city's reflection in the children growing up in its lap. They are so confident, fearless, social. I wasn't like that in my childhood.
The mountains teach you to be with yourself. You don't look for company, for there's so much to explore. As a child you are one with nature; you haven't yet learnt that mud is dirty, that the water from the spring is contaminated, that talking to yourself can look crazy. Parvin Shakir, a Pakistani poetess, whilst describing a child catching a butterfly, says: "Ek phool ko titli ke peechhe bhagte dekha (I saw a flower run after a butterfly)." This best describes the essence of a child, especially in the mountains. At a very early age, a door opened within me, giving me access to myself and, by chance, the ability to express myself on paper.
In Almora, the world was my playground. Alighting from the bus, my two sisters and I would race uphill to my nani's house, where only love awaited. There were no restrictions: the houses were never locked, meals of ras-bhaath and treats of bal mithai and "choklate" were never refused, and hugs and smacks were never held back.
There, I felt that it rained because the mountains wanted to be showered clean. I didn't know the meaning of scorching sun, for the sunlight there was always so kind, treating the sleepy town as its playground as it played hide and seek.Even the wind personified itself, whistling, shaking the saankal (chain), knocking on the doors. With winter came the warmth of love—of families sitting huddled around bonfires, sharing a quilt, eating bhune huye bhatt (roasted soyabeans) and recounting stories, usually spooky tales.

Prasoon with his college friends

Hometowns elicit different emotions and definitions. For some, it's the place where they were born, for some the place in which they grew up and went to school or college, and for others where their parents came from. Having led a nomadic life, for me none of these are completely true. Our ancestors supposedly migrated from Maharashtra or Gujarat. I was born in Almora and grew up in Rampur, Meerut, Rajasthan, Lucknow and Delhi. Mumbai is where I live and work and embrace as home now.
But when I think hard, the place I can truly call my hometown is Almora. I must say it does have an unfair advantage, though. I stayed in Almora mainly during the summer and winter holidays. Its memory does not carry the stench of stagnancy, or the angst of growing up, the pressure of academics, the pain of being shunned, the battle for a job, the fight to survive.

Happiness quotient: A home in one of the many hillside villages of Almora district

Memory can be very subjective and selective, wiping away unpleasant memories from the past. I know that for many people, hometowns often have not-so-pleasant memories attached to them—memories that disturb, memories they don't want to keep. Some can vividly recall times when they wanted to run away because the place was so devoid of energy, devoid of the sights and sounds of the big city where people spoke in different languages, rode in luxury cars, visited fancy restaurants and had more interesting things to do than wait for an evening telecast of Doordarshan. Or memories of that disappointing visit back home when one found that the familiar people and places had changed and the town was in decay, the landmarks, so bright and shiny in memory, now devoid of life and colour. I guess it is for the most part true that memory is not about how things really were, but what you choose to nurture.
Almora will remain for me a place where the stones on the road speak, where I don't need to ask for directions, where there are no worldly expectations, where one can get such joy from doing nothing, where the soul is soothed because it feels anchored.

The Story of India.

http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/

Synopsis

The world's largest democracy and a rising economic giant, India is now as well known across the globe for its mastery of computer technology as it is for its many-armed gods and its famous spiritual traditions. But India is also the world's most ancient surviving civilization, with unbroken continuity back into prehistory.

Like other great civilizations—Greece or Egypt, for example—over the millennia it has enjoyed not just one but several brilliant golden ages in art and culture. Its great thinkers and religious leaders have permanently changed the face of the globe. But while the glories of Rome, Egypt, and Greece, have all been the subject of TV portraits, as yet there has been no television story of India on our screens. This series sets out for the first time to do that: to show a world audience the wonders of India; the incredible richness and diversity of its peoples, cultures and landscapes; and the intense drama of its past, including some of the most momentous, exciting and moving events in world history.

India's history is a ten thousand year epic but for over two millennia, India has been at the center of world history. It has seen successive invasions from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to Tamburlaine and the British, all of whom left their mark but all of whom succumbed, in the end, to India herself. For all that time India has been famous for its spiritual traditions; it gave birth to two world religions, one of which—Buddhism—had a profound impact on all of East Asia, China, Japan and Korea, and in modern times has found root even in the US and Europe. The subcontinent is home to one of the world's greatest—and least understood—artistic traditions and to an extraordinary spectrum of music, dance and literature. India was also, and still is, a great center for technology and science, inventing—for example—the decimal system with zero, which is the basis of all modern science, mathematics and economics. India gave birth to some of the most remarkable characters in world history, including the Buddha, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, and the Moghul emperor Akbar the Great, not to mention the likes of Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi.

Now, in the era of globalization, India has once again become a leading player in the world. Home to more than one billion people it is a land of amazing contrasts: it contains both the high tech brilliance of Bangalore's Silicon Valley and the archaic splendour of the Kumbh Mela festival, where 25 million pilgrims come to bathe in the sacred river Ganges on a single night. While moving at high speed into the 3rd millennium, India alone, of all the civilizations on the face of the earth, is still in touch with her ancient past.

In this landmark six-part series for PBS and the BBC, Michael Wood will embark on a dazzling and exciting journey through today's India, "seeking in the present for clues to her past, and in the past for clues to her future".

PART 1. 60MIN

Episode 1 - Beginnings

Michael Wood travels throughout the subcontinent, tracing the richness and diversity of its peoples, cultures and landscapes. Through ancient manuscripts and oral tales Michael charts the first human migrations out of Africa. He travels from the tropical backwaters of South India through lost ancient cities in Pakistan to the vibrant landscapes of the Ganges plain. In Turkmenistan dramatic archaeological discoveries cast new light on India’s past.In Turkmenistan, there they find a civilisation named "Zorashtrian", and there they also find horse drawn carts or chariots called Raths which are mentioned in the Rig Veda.

Wood also attempts to re-create soma, an ancient drink recorded in the Rig Veda.

PART 2. 60MIN

Episode 2 - The Power of Ideas

The second episode in Michael Wood’s series moves on to the revolutionary years after 500BC - the Age of the Buddha. Travelling by rail to the ancient cities of the Ganges plain, by army convoy through Northern Iraq, and on down the Khyber Pass, he shows how Alexander the Great’s invasion of India inspired her first empire. The Rise of Maurya kingdom.

PART 3. 60MIN

Episode 3 - Spice Routes and Silk Roads

In this episode he traces India in the days of the Roman Empire. In Kerala the spice trade opened India to the world, whilst gold and silk bazaars in the ancient city of Madurai were a delight for visiting Greek traders. From the deserts of Turkmenistan Michael travels down the Khyber Pass to Pakistan to discover a forgotten Indian Empire (Kushan Empire) that opened up the Silk Route and at Peshawar built a lost Wonder of the World. That wonder nowadays people known as "Bare Raja Ka Tila". Also offers an interesting theory about the death of Emperor Kanishka at Mathura.

PART 4. 60MIN

Episode 4 - Ages of Gold

The achievements of the country’s golden age, including how India discovered zero, calculated the circumference of the Earth and wrote the world’s first sex guide, the Kama Sutra. In the south, the giant temple of Tanjore and traditional bronze casters, working as their ancestors did 1,000 years ago are shown.

PART 5. 60MIN

Episode 5 - The Meeting of Two Oceans

The documentary series about the history of India charts the coming of Islam to the subcontinent and one of the greatest ages of world civilisation: the Mughals. Michael Wood visits Sufi shrines in Old Delhi, desert fortresses in Rajasthan and the cities of Lahore and Agra, where he offers a new theory on the design of the Taj Mahal. He also looks at the life of Akbar, a Muslim emperor who decreed that no one religion could hold the ultimate truth, but whose dream of unity ended in civil war.

PART 6. 60MIN

Episode 6 - Freedom and Liberation

This episode examines the British Raj and India’s struggle for freedom. Wood reveals how in South India a global corporation came to control much of the subcontinent, and explores the magical culture of Lucknow, discovering the enigmatic Briton who helped found the freedom movement. He traces the Amritsar massacre, the rise of Gandhi and Nehru, and the events that led to the Partition of India in 1947.

The Story of One.

Truly a must see. Do check it out. BN.

The story of the number one is the story of Western civilization. Terry Jones ("Monty Python's Flying Circus") goes on a humor-filled journey to recount the amazing tale behind the world's simplest number. Using computer graphics, "One" is brought to life, in all his various guises, in STORY OF 1, airing on PBS Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 8:00-9:00 p.m. ET. One's story reveals how celebrated civilizations in history were achieved, where our modern numbers came from and how the invention of zero changed the world forever - and saved us from having to use Roman numerals today.

How old is One? A precise answer is impossible, but a notched bone (called the Ishango bone) found in the Congo proves that he's been around for at least 20,000 years. His life really took off 6,000 years ago, when the Sumerians turned him into a cone-shaped token and then into the first-ever numeric character, invention that made arithmetic - and therefore city life - possible, providing the means to assess wealth, calculate profits and loss, and, perhaps most important, collect taxes.

A thousand years later in Egypt, time-traveler Jones witnesses the first use of "million," as well as the invention of formal measurement: Egyptians create their own version of one, the cubit. Without the cubit, some of the wonders of the world might have been ... a little less wonderful. STORY OF 1 gives the viewer a glimpse of how a cubit-challenged pyramid would look.

Then it's on to ancient Greece, where One was held in high regard. However, his biggest fan, Pythagoras, lost his mind studying him, and the renowned Archimedes was so absorbed in diagrams that he lost his life to an invading Roman. The Romans slew One, too; they had no time for theoretical mathematics. In his new incarnation, "I" became a tool for imposing order.

Unwieldy though they were, Roman numerals would dominate Europe for the next 2,000 years. Jones discovers how the numbers we use today eventually managed to supplant them, making it much easier for us to subtract MDCCLVIII from MDCCCXLIV. It all begins in India, where the symbols for one through nine were invented and where Jones tracks down the first use of "zero." Here, STORY OF 1 takes a romantic turn. In Zero, One found his perfect mate. It was a union that would change the world.

Then it's on to Baghdad, where Jones discovers that Muslem scholars were smitten with One and Zero - and two through nine as well. The most famous Muslim scholar, Al-Khwarizmi, and his colleagues taught these performing numerals a whole set of new tricks, feats that enabled science, mathematics and astronomy to reach new heights in the Middle East.

The Indian numbers were a smash hit across the Islamic world before they were finally brought to Europe, where they met fierce resistance. It took 500 years for the battle between Roman and Indian numbers to play out, but by the 16th century, the Indian figures, now commonly called Arabic numerals, finally triumphed - perhaps because Florentine mathematician Fibonacci showed Christian merchants how useful Indian numerals could be, for instance, for calculating profits.

But the story doesn't end there. Within a hundred years, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz invented a binary system, using the Adam and Eve of mathematics, One and Zero. Since then, as the language of computers, this two-digit binary system has come to dominate every part of modern life.

In a new four-part series, the BBC’s Iranian Expert Sadeq Saba travels around his home country meeting its people and exploring the culinary history and culture of the different regions.

A Taste of Iran will be a journey of discovery of a land and its culture through its cuisine. In a series of four documentaries BBC’s Iran expert Sadeq Saba will guide the audience through different regions of Iran as he explores the culinary history and culture of Iranians.

But what differentiates this series from other travel shows and films about Iran is the access of the filmmakers to ordinary Iranians across the country and the filmakers depth of knowledge about Iran and Iranians.

In his sojourns through Iran Sadeq will meet interesting characters who will tell him about all things food related and beyond. He will travel to four regions of Iran and in each region he will find an extraordinary variety of food as well as cultural and historical backgrounds.

The regions are: 1- The capital, Tehran 2- North, provinces of Gilan and Mazandran 3- South and East, including provinces of Khorsan, Yazd, Baluchistan, Isfahan, Fars and Khouzestan and 4- West, provinces of Lorestan, Azerbaijan and Kurdistan.

PART 1

India's first Oscar winner walks down memory lane
Indo-Asian News Service
Friday, February 20, 2009 (Mumbai)

Twenty-seven years ago, she made history when she became the first Indian to win an Oscar. Now, as two other Indians are again within kissing distance of that prized statuette, Bhanu Athaiya walks down nostalgia lane to remember that 1982 day when she won the Oscar for best costume design for Gandhi.

The Mumbai-based designer, who has worked in over 100 films and wrote herself into the record books with her work in Richard Attenborough's epic movie Gandhi, is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and therefore cautious about commenting on A R Rahman and Resul Pookutty.

India has found its place in the Academy's walk of fame with Danny Boyle's movie Slumdog Millionaire, based on a novel by Indian bureaucrat Vikas Swarup. The movie has picked up 10 nominations, including three for composer Rahman -- for best Original Score and two for best Original Song - and one for sound engineer Resul Pookutty who has been nominated along with two others for achievement in sound mixing.
As an excited India awaits Oscar night with anticipation, Athaiya is also upbeat. But circumspect.
"As a voting member of the Academy, I am not supposed to comment on the movie or the nominees. But I congratulated Rahman for his nomination (best Musical Score) in many television channels.

"I had worked with him earlier in Lagaan and Swades. He mostly works out of his studio in south India. We meet at some stage during the making of the movies we work in. He is very versatile and has such a rich education," said Athaiya.

The designer recalls the day she was auditioned for Gandhi. "Richard Attenborough interviewed me in July 1982 and then he auditioned me. In 15 minutes, he told the office that he had found a designer. He asked me to join the team at the Ashok Hotel in Delhi on Sep 1. The shooting was supposed to commence on Nov 1."
Working on Gandhi was tough. "It was difficult because we had to show 50 years of the Mahatma's life in various locations, including Dandi. In South Africa, Gandhi was young and he changed over the years; it was difficult to capture the look. There were other sequences too - where hundreds of people in period costumes had to be used. You can well imagine the kind of study I undertook to create the look."
"I had to do the job single-handedly. I had to compete with an international crew and the challenge was to match their standards. But I managed to create the look of the times."

When the Oscar nominations were announced, Gandhi featured in a big way. "And I was asked to go to the Dorothy Chandler pavilion in Los Angeles for the awards. Five movies, La Traviata, Sophie's Choice, Tron, Victor/Victoria and Gandhi were contending for the Oscar. But before the awards, my fellow designers predicted that the Oscar would come my way because the canvas of the movie was so huge."

She remembers what she said on stage while Attenborough. "This is too good to be true. Thank you, Sir Richard Attenborough for focusing world attention on India."
Soon after being honoured by the Academy, Athaiya was nominated as a voting member. She gets Oscar ballot papers every year and has the right to comment on a movie and select it.

Athaiya has worked in over 100 movies since the 1950s, with noted filmmakers like Guru Dutt, Yash Chopra, Raj Kapoor, Ashutosh Gowarikar and Conrad Rooks. Apart from an Oscar for Gandhi, Athaiya has won national awards for costumes in Lagaan and Swades.
"Lagaan was a challenging exercise because it was a fiction set in 1893. A lot of studies went in for it, but Swades was a smaller challenge because I had to create the wardrobe for an NRI living in New York. I had to make sure that it had not been picked off the shelves of New York so that the producer could be comfortable with the budget," Athaiya said.

Having started her career in 1956 with CID, Athaiya is still going strong and is working on her third Marathi movie. 

After winning hearts with (all) their previous ad works, the latest one from the Amul stable is that of the evergreen musician A. R. Rahman and his award- winning spree! After having won at the BAFTA's, Golden Globes and with the stage all set for the Oscars …Rahman is surely one man on a roll! And Amul has captured this very essence in its most buttery way, by having a snap of Rahman alongside a host of awards. Alongside is the most apt one-liner that says 'Make Rehman your mehmaan! Amul…Toasted everywhere!'

All that we would like to tell the Amul guys is to keep their ad ready well in advance about A.R. Rahman winning at the Oscars.

India's 'sound' success

By Prachi Pinglay
BBC News, Mumbai

Could this be the year of the Indian technician at the forthcoming Oscar awards? 

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire has already hit the headlines for its achievements - the first Indian film to win a Golden Globe and a record number of awards and nominations at the prestigious Bafta ceremony.

This has understandably brought the film's actors and musicians into the limelight. But before too long the film's technicians could also be basking in cinematic glory.

Resul Pookutty won the Bafta for sound design for Slumdog Millionaire with Glenn Freemantle, Richard Pryke, Tom Sayers and Ian Tapp.

Aesthetic freedom

Since then "sound guys" in the Indian film industry have become the subject of much discussion and attention.

Sound technicians are the people who make a film sound like it does - recording on location and editing and reworking of sound effects during post-production.

In India, they are called sound engineer, sound technician or sound designer and each job has its own definition depending on the aesthetic freedom they get.

Work ranges from merely recording and repairing to composing, mixing, editing of various sounds, dubbing and background score.

Resul Pookutty, a graduate from the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India, has been in the industry for over 10 years and has worked on several big films. He is now a household name in India and is hotly tipped to win an Oscar this year.

At his studio in suburban Mumbai, three other sound engineers work on several films.

Amrit, who worked with Mr Pookutty on Slumdog, says that over 50 to 60 sounds are mixed to create a particular sound which may last for not more than 20 seconds.

There is lot of work, both indoors and outdoors, but it is hardly noticed by people, he says.

He points out that working on locations in Mumbai was one of the toughest challenges for Slumdog.

"It was not an easy film to do. Even though it had a small budget, technically it was one of the most advanced."

Over the last decade Mr Pookutty has seen the industry change.

"In the early 1990s the equipment was not enough to do live sound or sync sound. Now sync sound technique has increased and it's a great change."

Filmmakers say it is only now that experiments with sound have started.

 Constant struggle

Anurag Kashyap, who made films like Black Friday, No Smoking and more recently, Dev D, has used ample experimentation in sound in his films.

He says that in earlier days, people used background score from stock sounds but now young filmmakers are trying to use it differently.

"I find the right people for each of my films and then work with them. Every film needs a different score."

Another well known film maker, Rajat Kapoor, has made several off-beat low budget films and worked with Resul Pookutty for over a decade.

"In the 50's Hindi cinema used sound very well. Films like Mahal (one of the earliest suspense-horror films) had phenomenal sound.

"However, the 1970s, 80s and 90s were bad times for cinema, every aspect degenerated. Now with the coming of multiplexes and different filmmakers, more attention is being paid to visual and sound aspects."

However, for most sound engineers a constant struggle is the reality.

Dean Picardo, who works at Purple Haze, a well known studio in Mumbai, says that in terms of talent and equipment India does not lag behind.

"The budget that is set aside for the sound department by the producer is much lower than other departments like cinematography and actor fees," he says.

"That has to change. For example when films are shot in New York, the police help in keeping the crowds who gather silent. Here a sound designer has to work with the crew to keep crowds quiet."

In India, sound engineers could start their career "working for free", getting around $200 to $300 per month for a long time. However the top technicians make several times more.

Despite the rough ride, most sound engineers swear by their profession.

Platform

Ganesh G, a sound engineer who works with a big production house, says that perseverance is the key.

"If you are really passionate you don't give up. If you have it, you'll make it in this industry. It takes time, but it is about passion."

Mr Picardo agrees. He says that says if the project is exciting enough, every sound technician will do the job, no matter what the obstacles.

"No one thrives, they only survive. It's a fight on daily basis on personal as well as professional front. But we do it."

Mr Pookutty feels that today sound engineers are getting paid better because of the dearth of qualified trained professionals.

But others feel they have a long way to go before they get remuneration to match their work and talent.

Filmmakers and technicians unanimously agree, though, that the success of Slumdog Millionaire has provided a platform and a benchmark for Indian technicians. They hope that things from now onwards will only get better.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7895708.stm
Published: 2009/02/18 05:21:13 GMT
© BBC MMIX

The Nominations for Achievement In Sound Mixing category are:

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Mark Weingarten
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo and Ed Novick
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty
• “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt
• “Wanted” (Universal), Chris Jenkins, Frank A. Montaño and Petr Forejt

Probably one of the most well done interviews with AR in the last few years. Very insightful indeed. Cheers. BN.

He changed the face of film music. Now he’s changing the face of his music.

JUNE 2008 - THE MOST CELEBRATED MUSICAL ADDRESS in Chennai lies beyond a partly corroded gate whose colour has so far eluded consensus. It’s purple, said the first samaritan who attempted to guide me through the maze of bylanes that is this part of Kodambakkam. The second kind soul said lavender, and a third leaned towards mauve. Ten minutes later, standing in front of this entrance of apparently indeterminate hue, I decide to go with mauve. Mauve. It feels nice to roll around the tongue. It sounds sophisticated.

This mauve runs through the most unexpected spaces in Allah Rakha Rahman’s recording studio. It’s on the borders of the doors in the waiting room, doors whose signs indicate that they open out to Studio 3 and Studio 2. (Studio 1 is invisible from where I sit.) It’s on the ceiling, on the yards of gauzy material diffusing the light from lamps overhead. It’s on the fabric of the ergonomic chair in front of the keyboard behind me, a Fender Rhodes Mark II Seventy Three Stage Piano. Perhaps Rahman will complete the theme. Perhaps it’ll be on his person when he walks in.

But Rahman enters in a maroon kurta that’s as rumpled as the hair on that boyish face. Once you’ve sold over a hundred million albums worldwide, you can apparently dispense with combs. And hearty pleasantries. The mumbled greeting almost doesn’t make it, fighting its way out through a smog of sleep.

Rahman looks as if he’s just woken up. Considering it’s fourteen minutes past six – that’s PM, for the uninitiated – he probably has, after a gruelling night of recording. As he leads the way to Studio 3, a cascade of sound crashes through the so-far-silent waiting room. An assistant emerges from behind a door, perhaps the door to the mysterious Studio 1. It closes behind him and locks out the music that has lingered just so long as to tease. So much for wanting to brag about bearing witness to an AR Rahman work-in-progress.

As he opens the door to Studio 3, it’s clear that the only recording that’s possible here is on my Dictaphone. This is just a cubbyhole. There’s a table. A couple of swivel chairs. Hardly the dizzying array of musical geegaws I imagined. Rahman picks a chair and arranges himself in a pose that a yoga instructor would describe as the lotus position with one dangling limb. The homey posture adds to the disquieting impression that the real Rahman is going to stride in any time, boot this happy pretender out and take over his seat, one imperious leg crossed over the other.

But this is the real Rahman opposite me, barreling through the conversation with fragments of sentences – phrases, really – as if he’d long ago realised that fully-articulated declarations had a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping up with his thoughts. Between these phrases, Rahman pauses a lot. He also laughs a lot. It’s a nice, open sound that makes you think he’s dropping his guard. Then the laugh dies away, and so does the presumption.

Rahman is especially guarded about revealing his feelings about that morning’s big news. The Madras High Court had dismissed the public interest litigation against him (for disrespecting the national anthem in his album Jana Gana Mana, an in-spirit follow-up to Vande Mataram). “I think, me being patriotic and all,” he begins, and instantly changes his mind. “But don’t. That’s already done.”

A microsecond of an internal struggle later, he realises he wants to talk about it after all. “I knew that it would be over. After all, the President released it. And he can’t be wrong.” That open laugh again. Then a pause, followed by a platitude. “I think it’s good that people raise questions and that they are answered in the right way.”

I wonder if this generosity towards people raising questions extends to interviewers. I may already know the answer, but Rahman, to his credit, at least makes the attempt to meet me halfway. He doesn’t mind interviews, “But only selectively. Otherwise I feel very naked. I feel I’ve given everything away, all the information away.” It sounds like a new admission, but it’s the old celebrity dilemma: you want to reach out to your adoring public, and you still want your privacy.

That’s the thing about being in the limelight: there are no shadows to hide in. And this year, especially, has been an extremely visible one for Rahman. It began with a critically-adored hit (Guru) and went on to a critic-proof blockbuster (Sivaji: The Boss) – though Rahman himself may have been overly critical about his work in the latter.

He’s usually happy with the final product he delivers, and even if there are problems, “We usually have enough time to fix things.” But after finishing Adhiradee, the song that he sang, he never liked it. “The director [Shankar] could imagine it, but I could never get the picture he had in mind. But when I saw it, I was blown. He had taken it to some other level.”

There. In his own words. The Mozart of Madras all but wolf-whistling over a Rajinikanth music video. But Rahman makes no apologies about the commercial aspect of his art. “Hit music is important for a mainstream film. It helps you get a good opening. And as an artist, I am happy when people say this is the highest selling album. I am really happy about it because we worked so hard on it – not only me, but the whole team.”

It’s hard to begrudge Rahman his little-boy delight over an album that’s far from his best, especially in light of the fate that befell some of the other, better work. “There was so much stuff in Bose, so much energy and thought. But the producers didn’t release it properly and it suffered a great deal.”

That’s a rare controversial statement – an accusation, practically. And yet, there was a silver lining, a light at the end of the tunnel, whatever you want to call it. “I went to a restaurant in San Francisco. This Iranian lady came to me and said: ‘You are AR Rahman.’ I said yes. She said: ‘Oh we love your Zikr in Bose. It’s so famous in Iran.’ I never expected that.”

Delayed recognition is not new to Rahman, for each release of his goes through a familiar two-step programme: (a) derisive dismissal, followed by (b) inevitable capitulation after multiple listens, reinforcing the urban legend that His Songs Take Time To Grow On You. Rahman, at first, gets defensive. “When we do a song, the director listens to it thousands of times, and only when everyone likes it, we go ahead.” The song goes through a filter. There’s already some kind of assurance there. “So when people react negatively, we have to wait for three weeks, because we know that the song works (or doesn’t work).”

But Rahman understands. After all, he’s been through the same cycle with that other King of Pop. “I used to wait for Michael Jackson’s albums, and the very first time, I used to say: Oh, I don’t like any of the songs.” Three days later, he’d find that a song was actually good. Then he’d watch the videos, and yet another one would become an earworm. Finally, all the songs would make it to the list. “Because so much hard work goes into an album, and when something is new, you can’t judge it. The expectations are too high.”

They still are – with each project Rahman takes on. “There is always this question: ‘How can I do this best?’ I’ve never ever thought, let me just do a fast job.” The prospect of Rahman rolling up his sleeves for a “fast job” would no doubt be sweet music to a producer’s ears, sweeter even than the songs being created. “But I have never looked at music in any other way. Whatever goes out of my studio is precious. I tell this to my staff also. It has to be so precious that substandard stuff will never go out.”

And then, a dash of practicality to temper this perfectionist streak. “Beyond that, we can’t help it.” Because there’s only so much you can do, especially while working on big, international projects like Shekhar Kapur’s Golden Age (with Scottish composer Craig Armstrong), when it’s very difficult to switch to something else. I think he means masala-movie music. And despite this focus, despite this variety, when people don’t seem to get it, it rankles. “I’m always asked why my music sounds repetitive. And I ask: ‘What sounds repetitive?’ If you have a point, prove it and I can correct my mistake.”

Perhaps being tired of being all things to all people, Rahman tries to satisfy himself now. “At first, it used to be about being faithful to the director’s vision.” Then he found that some filmmakers are not connected to the audience. And after all these years and all this experience, “I can spot something and say: ‘You can’t put a song here. It won’t work.’ And most of the time, my predictions have been right.”

Sometimes, it goes beyond predictions. Sometimes, Rahman doesn’t even take on a project, “Because people have their lens on me so much, it will kill the movie. If it’s a small movie, and you put this name on it, they go there expecting the sky.”

There’s just no stopping Rahman, now that he’s gotten started about criticism. He attacks that other accusation often levelled at him – that he works out of one of India’s most well equipped and advanced recording studios, that he’s nothing without his technology, that older composers were not such slaves to gadgetry.

“I’ve played in that era. I’ve done arrangements in that era. I used to record in mono – and if one person made a mistake, we all had to play all over again.” He thinks, for their time, they were the best, Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy and KV Mahadevan. He’s a big fan. “But they always say that old wine is better than new wine, so we should wait for this wine to become old,” he laughs.

The musician as patient vintner. It’s a rich metaphor, though one somewhat ironic – for Rahman’s is the rare instance of a fairly young wine being toasted on platforms of rare vintage, like the London stage. There was, however, a period of maturation before Bombay Dreams could be uncorked.

“Shekhar [Kapur] and I were trying to work on a musical called Tara Rum Pum Pum.” They worked for a couple of years. They finished a lot of numbers. Then Shekhar had this huge opportunity of doing Elizabeth and he had to leave. “It was frustrating, but I realised how important it was for him to become big. So I didn’t care about losing those ten numbers.”

“I think he probably felt something,” Rahman smiles, speculating that his successful international foray owed as much to his own gifts as someone else’s guilty conscience. “He met Andrew Lloyd Webber and everything happened.” That was his biggest gamble, Rahman feels, going for Bombay Dreams and leaving all his work here. “It took two to three years. But I think the gamble was good, not only for me but for Asians there – for India I would say. It raised a lot of questions about us. I would say it gave me an address.”

If the bag-and-baggage relocation left Rahman with insecurities about rivals encroaching on his turf, he dismisses the notion with a philosophical shrug. (Though, truth be told, a philosophical shrug is how Rahman dismisses pretty much everything. These are possibly the limberest shoulders in musicdom.)

“I think the competition is within myself. There’s so much you could do, but because of the time factor and other things, if you think of 100%, you deliver 30%.” So he never thinks of others as competition. At least, he tries not to. “Because I believe that my share is defined by God. And that’s what I’m getting. So even if I want to do 30 movies, I can’t because it’s not my share. Unlike earlier, when a composer was in the limelight, he used to take all the movies and even when somebody wanted to go to another person, he would say: ‘No, no, don’t go. I’ll do it for less.’ I don’t need that.”

Is he talking about… Could he be referring to… I guess we’ll never know. You don’t get to complete an interview by asking these things midway. “Anyway, it’s a great time to be a composer. We’re all enjoying extraordinary comforts. Never before have we had this kind of exposure. Even the small composers, if they do good work, they are celebrated because of the music.”

RAHMAN’S FIRST MEMORY OF MUSIC is listening to RK Sekhar’s songs. That was his father, who composed and arranged music for Malayalam films. “Apart from that, the records that he owned. Osibisa. Jim Reeves. Switched-On Bach.” He’s just picked up on something. “You’re trying to relate all this to my music now, aren’t you?” The unspoken question that hovers, however, is this: Is there anyone who wouldn’t make the connection between childhood memories of Bach being played on a Moog synthesiser and the instant-recall image of Rahman smiling, a keyboard beside him?

Rahman realises this. He continues. “Those days, we never had good records. There was this shop in Bangalore where they would record onto cassettes. All musicians, whenever we’d go to Bangalore, we’d take a day off, go to the shop and record music. Chick Corea and Vangelis and Dave Grusin.” History and Science and Math, inevitably, came a distant second. Just how distant, you ask? “If you take a class of fifty, there was no rank for me.”

“But,” he quickly explains – perhaps realising that this admission will ensure that slacking students everywhere are going to worship at the shrine of AR Rahman – “it was because I used to work side by side.” (Rahman’s father passed away early, leaving his son the responsibility of caring for the family.) “Setting up stuff, playing for Wonder Balloon on TV – all this meant taking leave.”

And yet, Rahman never dreamed of becoming a musician. There was no dressing up in rock-star duds and playing in front of a mirror over the screams of millions of imaginary fans. “I could never see myself performing. Even today, when I have an interview, when my wife switches the TV on, I’ve trained my daughter to switch it off.”

The irony of such self-effacement in a career that routinely requires him to perform on stage, in front of thousands, doesn’t escape him. “But I don’t like to watch myself,” he persists. “I think it’s something in the imagination… That is something else and what I see is something else.”

But he doesn’t mind hearing himself sing. “That’s okay.” A rapid dot-connecting exercise results in a hazy theory: maybe he’s just more into sound than visuals. “My main interest was electronics, hardware, that kind of stuff. That’s because we had so much stuff. I was fascinated with it.” Yes. He’s definitely more into sound than visuals.

“The most important person for us at the time was the hardware engineer.” This guy called Raghavan. If something went wrong, they’d go stand at his doorstep. “He was the only person who could fix everything.” Including a temperamental rhythm box – a contraption with a row of buttons titled Rock and Jazz and such, which made up the percussion section of Rahman’s one-man shows.

“I’d be playing, and suddenly only noise would come out of it.” A quick call to Raghavan would ensure that Rahman never missed a beat. “He was a hardworking guy. Always used to work at nights.” But if those nocturnal visits are responsible for Rahman’s now-renowned practice, of composing during hours where the only other people at work are at call-centres servicing American clients, he isn’t telling. “That’s because of… other things.”

Raghavan was eventually nudged out by Roger Waters, when Rahman’s classmates roped him into a band for inter-school cultural competitions. “These guys introduced me to rock and Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. Before that, I was playing mainly the compositions of my master Nityanandam. And film songs.” Some five years after the high-school headbanging came Roots, the band Rahman formed with musicians like Sivamani and John Anthony and Jojo and Raja. “After we went through this big journey of rock and pop, we thought we’d do our own thing. I got my sequencing gear. We composed pieces.”

Not songs. Pieces. “It was more experimental, actually, but also Indian. It was my influences at that time.” Rahman hesitates to use the dreaded F-word to describe this music. “But yes. That was the height of fusion – around 1987-88, when L Shankar asked us to back his band, Epidemics.”

They had just a couple of performances, one in Bangalore, one in Chennai. But this experience helped in terms of exposure to a new way of thinking, a new way of preparation for a concert, and about how serious it was to be a professional. “It led us to good things.” But what led Shankar to Rahman, that’s still not clear. “He claims he was my neighbour in Mylapore, when I was very young.”

Roots was only half as successful as Epidemics, winding up with a grand total of one performance. “At IIT-Madras… no, Anna University, I guess.” There was no time for an encore, once Rahman gave up the stage for the studios. “I became an arranger. I used to work in Bangalore a lot, for [the composer] Vijay Anand.”

Steady work. Steady money. A sandbox filled with big-studio technology. To the ears of a great many struggling musicians, the situation would have translated to a Puccini aria. Rahman, however, heard only discordant notes. “It was frustrating. It was only film music. To liberate yourself from this and go to another space was impossible. A normal person would never relate to what we wanted to play.”

Even if there’s a bit of a whine there – the whine of a kid picking at a full plate of food when there are millions starving in Ethiopia – it’s hard not to empathise. We are, after all, talking about a time when jobless thirtysomethings mooching off retired parents with a foot in the grave were accorded more respect than an I-want-to-change-the-world musician. Rahman himself felt that by not giving in to peer pressure, by not becoming a CA or an engineer, “I’ve missed out on something great. I thought I was going to suffer in the future.” So much for crystal gazing.

That insecurity could be why Rahman surrounded himself with musician friends: a group of get-no-respects. “I just have two or three guys,” he says, of friends who opted for more conventional careers. “They’re all doing well. One is in Microsoft.” But if there was any longing about trading the synthesiser for a keyboard, it was only Rahman’s. No one at home cared.

“My mother had this killer instinct that I should become a musician,” he laughs. Rahman still harboured hopes of scraping through a correspondence course, “But I could never do it.” He feels that’s why he’s slow in a lot of things. “When I write emails, I manage just one word or two words.” Clearly, even artists acknowledged as genius-in-their-lifetime are entitled to petulance over the inadequacy of their electronic communication.

The bad rap that musicians got – the Scarlet M, if you will – kept eating away at Rahman. “I wanted to set another example, to show that not all musicians are… like that,” he says, explaining away “that” as booze-swilling, babe-hounding bohemians. “When I was playing (the keyboard) for Ilayaraja, I realised he was not that kind of guy. He used to be a saint, sitting there and creating great music. So the image of a musician at the time, in inverted commas, was completely different from what I saw. That was a great thing.”

Greater things were in store. “When I was playing with Ilayaraja, I met this amazing keyboard player, Viji Manuel.” Manuel composed jingles, and he asked Rahman to assist him and programme for him. Then a filmmaker from Kerala, Isaac Thomas, gave Rahman a jingle to compose. “That was the first one, I think, for a colour lab.” It takes a little imagining, that the go-to guy for the soundtrack of every single prestige production today was once toiling away at background scores that could be zapped away with an unceremonious flick of the remote control – but as they say, the journey of a thousand miles often begins with a single 30-second ad.

That ad was for Allwyn Trendy watches. Rajiv Menon, who made the commercial, recalls that he first heard of Rahman – then known as Dilip, before his conversion to Islam – during an earlier assignment for Harvest rice bran oil. “We wanted to show a plate splitting, and we wanted a particular kind of sound – a breaking and splitting apart sound.” Someone told him about this whiz kid with sound effects technology. The rest was the beginning of history. The plate broke and split apart as no plate had broken and split apart in advertising.

Less destructive – but no less influential in furthering the early-Rahman legend – was the commercial for Leo Coffee, made by Sharada and Trilok of Trish Productions. They started out in 1987 and were asked to do a public service film for drug abuse in their very first year of operation.

“Someone suggested a young, new musician called Dilip,” says Sharada. “We fixed up the recording, and in came this tiny guy accompanied by loads of equipment, who talked nonstop and knew more tech specs on sound than the recordist.” Rahman delivered a track that was outstanding and the film won them many awards. “After that, we worked together on over a hundred ads.”

“Mani Ratnam is my cousin and would often ask me who did a particular track for an ad. Trilok and I would keep telling him to check out Dilip sometime.” Once, after a recording, they were heading out to see the first copy of [Mani Ratnam’s] Thalapathi, and Dilip asked if he could come too. He met Mani that evening. Mani called Sharada the next day to ask if he could listen to Dilip’s work, and Trilok took him across to the studio. “Mani called Dilip a day later,” – Rahman remembers it as “two weeks later” – “and offered him Roja.” There it is. The story behind the creation of a new musical universe – in one small paragraph.

Roja came out in 1992 and – despite Rahman’s assertion that “they didn’t like it instantly” – the album’s trajectory on the music charts was not unlike that of a Diwali rocket escaping its cloudy bottle. That, however, may not be the most appropriate of analogies, given the circumstances of the time.

“Around then, after my studio was done, my way of thinking, my philosophy – everything changed. I got spiritually influenced by Sufism. It was not ‘I am going to do this piece’ or ‘I am going to compose’ anymore. I nullified my ego and was waiting for spiritual inspiration.” Sharada adds, “Almost towards the end of composing for Roja, he told us he would like his name to be AR Rahman in the titles.”

Rahman has, at various times, discussed this issue of conversion to another religion, stressing on the death of his father and the miraculous recovery of a sister from a serious illness. But at this moment, he doesn’t want to talk about it. “It happened. I am here,” is all he’ll allow, a sliver of minimalistic poetry couching a larger philosophy.

He is, however, far more forthcoming about the tenet of Tauheed that he was attracted to. “It says that God is One. The ultimate love, you give to God. And because of that love, you have to love other people. Because everybody is His creation.” This road to virtue, inevitably, necessitated a full stop to vice. “I was probably drinking at the time. Beer and all that stuff. All that stopped.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE AT WORK during Roja. This was, finally, a shot at freedom from anonymity, a passport to recognition. “I realised that it was not worth it doing commercials alone. You’re working so hard, but in front of the people, you’re nothing.” The movies didn’t exactly seem a cure for this existential malaise, because Rahman hated the films of the time. The only person he admired was Mani Ratnam. “And when I got the chance of working with him, it was, again, divine intervention. Once I got to know him as a person, I felt there was something special happening here.”

Rahman had to leave all his other work to get into what he calls the mind-frame of his new project. “I had to leave my film playing. I had to leave commercials. It was not easy because I used to get paid quite a lot of money at that time.” And Roja didn’t pay much. “The money which I got for six months’ work was what I used to earn in a day.” Still, a few freewheeling conversations with his inner voice convinced Rahman that he had to do this.

“Something inside told me that without sacrifices, nothing can come. You can’t have everything.” On the other hand, you can be left with nothing. That’s what it seemed like when Rahman handed in his tunes to the director. “He never reacts instantly. He just organically waits till something goes into him.” And two weeks later, when Rahman didn’t hear from Mani Ratnam, he thought, “Okay, that’s the end of it.” It was now going to be jingles all the way. And then – when he had lost all hope – he was told that his tunes had made the cut.

Fifteen years after Roja, Rahman finds that it hasn’t become any easier. “At that time, that sound was just mine. Now people are sharing that sound. So to do something is not just about a different sound anymore.” Also, during Roja, it was just stereo. “Now we need to think about 5.1, DTS, what comes out of this speaker, what comes out of that speaker – and still hold the song together.”

Hence the layering. Rahman’s compositions, over the years, have gotten more complex; where there were once various individual strands, these are now knotted into a dense skein. “That’s also because I have the option to work abroad. I can get the musicians I want. Like for Jaage hain from Bose, we used almost 130 people – an orchestra, a choir and all that.”

Rahman’s uniquely improvisatory way of creating music – layer by layer, block by block, as opposed to writing out the entire composition and then going about arranging it – is the stuff of myth now. But the way Rahman puts it, it’s the stuff of miracles. “Every time I sit for music, I try to destroy my ego. At the same time, I have a sense of pride, that if I do something, it has to be good. It’s unnerving. It’s a paradox. It humbles you – and you wait for the intervention of God. You say: Give me a tune please. I need to make this work.”

This channel of communication, unsurprisingly, works in mysterious ways. “Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up, take a tape recorder and record a groove. Or just sitting somewhere, I get an idea.” Paathshala (from Rang De Basanti) was like that. The bursts of sound at the beginning came first. “CHAN… cha-cha-CHAN,” he sings. Then he goes to the studio and fine-tunes it.

Then again, maybe not. “Sometimes, you know it’s not happening, even if you sit there for hours. And you give up and say: when it happens, it happens.” This process can, of course, play havoc with film schedules. (Rumours have it that Rahman’s delays are behind Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar missing its release date this Id.) But Rahman says, “Well, they all know about my schedules. It’s not a bank job. We are all working towards something exciting. You make a movie over two years. So schedules can definitely be shifted around.”

Parents aren’t supposed to have favourites among their offspring, but Rahman’s eyes positively light up when he talks about Rang De Basanti. “Before Rang De Basanti, I was trying to balance my movies – from things like Bose or Swades to more commercial movies.” But all the commercial movies he signed got delayed, so what people heard was only Bose. And that was when Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra came in with yet another story involving freedom fighters. “I thought: I’ve already done Bose and The Legend of Bhagat Singh. So how do we make this different?”

By brainstorming a lot. “We made an effort to treat every situation differently. Like Sarfaroshi ki tamanna – it’s supposed to be the most ferocious anthem, and we did the opposite. We said: ‘Let’s make it sensuous. Let’s get Aamir Khan to do it.’ It was big energy, but an implosion rather than an explosion.” And when Madhavan dies, they tried to put another emotion parallel to that – a lullaby, so that people are not pushed to the edge.

“We said: ‘Every song should be a hit song.’ I know we say that for everything, but in this I think we were favoured by God.” The only apprehension that Rahman had was that Mehra never intended to shoot any of the songs in lip-sync, which would limit their association with a particular star during the television promos. “But the film was a great sensation, and all songs were accepted.”

So the process, apparently, is this: the tunes are a divine gift, which are then shaped by human hands. And ears. “When you are working with a team, they know exactly what to spot. What they want. So I don’t take the trouble of selecting the stuff. I just do the templates.” And if it so happens that the best template comes while servicing the worst director, then amen. So be it.

“I remember some of the more successful composers of the past, they would do twenty movies and they would just concentrate on the movies that they knew were going to work. For me, I say: ‘I sat with this guy and worked on this film. This is probably the most amazing tune this year, but God has given this tune for this guy.’ I should give it to him, even though I know he is going to destroy it for sure.” That’s his philosophy: never discriminate in art.

“Two or three years back, I was failing in my thinking. I used to think: ‘This is what Tamil audiences deserve. This is what Hindi audiences deserve.’ I became complacent because of the lack of time.” He was working mostly in the UK, on Bombay Dreams, and he was doing movies more for friendship than passion. This wasn’t the case earlier, when he composed the groundbreaking soundtracks whose tremors are felt to this day – Thiruda Thiruda and Bombay and Roja.

“When I did those, it used to be: Let’s push things to the extreme. Suddenly I wanted to do a theme like a Western classical piece. The Bombay theme. And I did it. Mani Ratnam did not expect it at all.” And now, that happy scenario is back. “A great piece of music is a great piece of music. Who cares if it’s Tamil or Hindi?”

But Rahman does care about a few other things, like being denied the music publishing rights, which is why he refused to compose for Farah Khan’s upcoming only-an-asteroid-hitting-the-earth-can-prevent-it-from-becoming-a-blockbuster, Om Shanti Om. “I was not speaking for myself alone, because I don’t care about money.”

And as if realising the incongruity of this statement from someone who reportedly gets paid in crores, Rahman corrects himself. “I care about money. But I don’t care about it, in another way. It was just that I needed to make a statement. I feel heartbroken when extraordinary artists go on the streets, begging. I’ve seen that happen. They’ve done their part, they’ve given stuff from their soul and they need to get what they deserve.”

And now some company has these rights – rights that should be shared with the musicians, the music composer, the lyricist. “The publishing rights are what give you that money. You never know what kind of media are going to come up and where music is going to be used. Ten years ago, who knew about ring tones? So why should musicians lose out? And anyway, it’s only a small window. When you’ve given five flops, nobody is going to come to you.”

This isn’t simply a matter of making hay during an equatorial noon. Rahman is almost as passionate about other issues that deprive musicians of their rightful due – issues like piracy. “I feel, if you can afford something, why not buy it? Okay, you downloaded it and listened to it. Make it a point then to go and buy the CD – because you’re supporting the artist and you’re supporting families who are involved in it.”

And yes, he speaks from personal experience, of being both pirate and penitent. “Suppose somebody is downloading something for me and making me listen to it, and if I enjoy it, I make sure I buy that CD and keep it at home, just as punishment – just as a feel-good factor for my conscience.”

The Om Shanti Om loss doesn’t rankle. Seriously. “Earlier, I used to be happy with just film music. It used to pay well. I used to get all the equipment I needed. But when things like 9/11 or Iraq happened, or even the bomb blasts in India, you find that the mind can do anything. And music is a power through which you can influence a mind. Music is one of the very few things that can give you hope.”

So, rather than giving statements in papers, Rahman chose a friendlier route – doing a song. “There are bigger problems in life. Let’s handle those instead of getting into petty fights that can hinder the progress of family or country.” Clearly, Om Shanti Om isn’t just a movie title anymore. It’s an existential mantra.

“The most exciting thing for me now is, instead of being commissioned by somebody, I commission myself.” Rahman is referring to his own label, KM Music, launched earlier this year. “I think I’m getting more guidance now. And I should use it. If I let it rust, it’s a waste for the community and for me. As long as I have that and I have the confidence, and as long as I am healthy, I want to carry on.”

Uh huh! Did he just admit to health worries, this boy-man without a streak of gray, without a line on his face? Looking at him, Rahmanesque could be how you describe the pinkness of health. “But I’m forty-and-a-half,” he says. “I’m not able to abuse my body as I used to – not sleeping continuously for three days, things like that. I fall ill the second day itself.”

And that’s a no-no, because it would interfere with daddy duties. “I’m trying to be a good father and a good musician. This is the time the kids are growing up. They’re asking loads of questions.” And if one of those questions is about what it feels like to be the first composer accepted all over India – north to south, east to west – he’d answer, “I think it’s a blessing.”

“Because there’s still a divide between north and south. You look at the Net and it’s really disgusting the way people talk to each other. ‘You southies are black and we are white.’ If you look at all that, people have been really kind in north India. Also, coming from a different community… Usually they say: ‘You’re a Muslim. You should change to a Hindu name.’ They’ve been allowing me to be myself. That’s fantastic.”

Copyright ©2008 Rolling Stone. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated

Apparently, the Pussycat Dolls are working on an album of just covers and they have recently (with Rahman’s support and complicity) added their English vocals to a remix of “Jai Ho.”

According to reports, American pop group Pussycat Dolls will team up with A R Rahman for the remix video track of Jai Ho.

The Pussycat Dolls, comprising of lead singer Nicole Scherzinger, Melody Thornton, Ashley Roberts, Jessica Sutta, Kimberly Wyatt and Carmit Bachcr achieved worldwide success in 2005 with their album PCD
The video version of Jai Ho will now see these hot ladies shaking a leg on the tunes of Rahman.

Here is the remix version of the song for you to listen to. See what you think.  Cheers.

I saw this film this weekend. So much has been said about Mickey Roukes performance and knowing all that you had a certain expectation from the film.

As a performance his portrayal of a lonley wrestler struggling with trying to get his life in order as he struggles with getting hurt by the people he cares much about more than all the beating he takes in the ring, is truly a toure-de-force. It ranks as easily one of the most intense perfomace (coming from way within the actor) I have seen in a really long time. I had seen this interview of Rouke with Charlie Rose a day before and that really put in perspective his perfomance and how hes been able to take this performance to another level.

The analogy to the “Passion of Christ” is rather apt…without giving too much away, as is the really well done song by Springstein. It rather tragic that the song whihc one the golden globe for best song, wasn't nominated for an oscar. As big as a fan of ARRehman I am, I do think this song deserves to be there with the best.

I must say that the movie itself is rather violent, and for a very good reason, so if you have a weak stomach I would suggest you carry a brown bag…but dont miss the film.

Cheers.

Raj.

Listen to the song, “The Wrestler” by Bruce Springstein here.

Mickey Rouke interviewed by Charlie Rose.

Also Check this out….

Bruce Springsteen's return to pop production (and the E Street Band) on his 2007 album Magic left him wanting more. Although he hadn't pushed himself to complete back-to-back albums in more than 30 years, The legendary singer's longtime producer, Brendan O'Brien, urged Springsteen to keep recording. 

"I thought, 'No, I haven't done that since my first two records came out in the same year,' " Springsteen says. "Usually, I don't write that quickly. But I went back to my hotel in Atlanta, and over the next week, I wrote several songs that formed the beginning of the new album (Working on a Dream). I found there was more than enough fuel for the fire to keep going."

Working on a Dream, streaming now on NPR Music — a week before its official release date — is Springsteen's 24th album. It was recorded with the E Street Band during breaks from the group's 2007 tour.

"I hope Working on a Dream has caught the energy of the band, fresh off the road from some of the most exciting shows we've ever done," Springsteen says. "All the songs were written quickly. We usually used one of our first few takes, and we all had a blast making this one from beginning to end."

Working on a Dream contains 12 new Springsteen songs and one bonus track, "The Wrestler," which is featured over the closing credits of Darren Aronofsky's 2008 film of the same name. The track also won a Golden Globe for Best Original Song.

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE ALBUM …..HERE

Magazine| Feb 16, 2009

profile

Mrs Prime Minister

Dignity in a high place, personified by a quiet, assertive sardarni

KHUSHWANT SINGH ON GURSHARAN KAUR

It is rare in Indian social and political life to find persons who have risen from obscurity to pre-eminence but have not fallen victim to self-importance, arrogance, hubris. If not them, it is members of their family who flaunt their close relationship to the achiever of eminence, to enhance their own status. The one exception I have run into is our prime minister, Manmohan Singh, his wife Gursharan Kaur, their brothers and sisters, and their three daughters. It is not surprising that most people do not even know who the prime minister's and his wife's relations are, and what they do to earn their livelihood.

Despite being on nodding terms with Manmohan Singh for almost 15 years, I knew very little about his background and not even his wife's name till after he became prime minister of India. All I knew about her was indirectly through my grand-daughter Naina Dayal, then studying in St Stephen's College. She was very taken up by her history professor, Dr Upinder Kaur, married to a fellow professor of philosophy, Vijay Tankha. Upinder Kaur was Naina's role model. She was her teacher's favourite student. Upinder was the eldest daughter of Manmohan Singh, then finance minister in Narasimha Rao's cabinet.

I was invited by Anil Wilson, then principal of St Stephen's, to give away prizes and certificates of merit to outstanding students. Before being ushered into the main hall where the students were assembled, I was introduced to members of the staff. When Wilson introduced me to Upinder Kaur, I asked her: "Are you Manmohan's daughter?" She nodded and mumbled, "Yes." I sensed she had not divulged this to her colleagues. When it came to giving away certificates of merit, I found my grand-daughter among the award-winners. Although she saw me every day, she had not told me about it. It was something she had learned from her teacher.

I occasionally met Manmohan Singh before he became prime minister. I canvassed for him when he was Congress candidate for the South Delhi Lok Sabha constituency. He lost to the BJP's Vijay Kumar Malhotra. After he became prime minister, I didn't see him. I got news of his household from my next-door neighbour Reeta Devi Verma who was, and is, in and out of the prime minister's residence. And from my friend Surbir Chhatwal of the IFS, who was his contemporary in Cambridge. It was through Reeta that I got to meet Gursharan Kaur.

It was a brief meeting. My first impression of her was of an unassuming, genteel, soft-spoken, comforting personality. Attractive in a homely sort of way: fair, buxom, dressed in a simple salwar-kameez with a pearl necklace round her neck. We exchanged polite banalities for a few minutes. I felt she should not be wasting her time on me. So I told her in Punjabi: "Gursharan, hun tu ja—now you go."
I had to do this at subsequent meetings as well. She was with her husband when he released my Illustrated History of the Sikhs (OUP) at the Le Meridien Hotel. In my thank-you speech, I indicated that no alcohol would be served till after the prime minister and his wife had left. They left immediately after the launch.
On another occasion in the same hotel, she stayed on late, enjoying tea and pastries. I was tired. I pleaded with her that I wanted to go home and could not leave till after she had left. "But I don't want to go home yet," she replied like a stubborn schoolgirl. "Manmohan is not expecting me back till later." I persisted in my plea and saw her to her car. She made fun of my boorish manners when she launched my translation of the Gurbani.
I wrote a profile of her in my column, based on what I had picked up about her background from friends of her family. I got a few facts wrong. I wrote her a letter of apology and suggested she come again to put me right.She wrote back (always in Gurmukhi) telling me not to worry and said she would get back to me soon.

She came. No fanfare of police escort cars with screaming sirens or flashing red lights. She saw my daughter and grand-daughter strolling on the lawn in front of my flat, stopped her car and joined them. Then the four of them, including Reeta, trooped into my sitting room where I awaited her beside a blazing log fire. I began my interrogation.

Gursharan Kaur's family came from Dhakam village in Jhelum district. They were in a small trading business. Her father studied only up to matric and got a clerical-level job in Burmah Shell. They paid their junior staff well. He was able to send his children to school wherever he was posted. Gursharan was the third of his five daughters and son. (They all live around Delhi but no one has heard any of them boasting about their relationship).
Gursharan was born in Jalandhar in 1937. Soon after, her father was transferred to Nowshera near Peshawar. Her early schooling was in a Singh Sabha school for girls. "Were you good at your studies?" I asked her. She smiled, "Average. Not like Manmohan. I managed to pass my exams. I was more interested in games and in singing Gurbani."

She was ten years old when her father was transferred to Amritsar in May 1947. They were lucky to escape the massacres that accompanied the partition of the country. Most of her schooling was in Amritsar and Patiala. She went to the Guru Nanak Kanya Pathshala for her matriculation and the Government College for Women in Patiala for her graduation. She got her BT (Bachelor of Teaching) from Khalsa College, Amritsar. She intended to be a school teacher.
Manmohan's family had migrated from Gah village in Chakwal district, now in Pakistan, to Amritsar. He came with a formidable reputation for scholarship. He had won a stipend to do his tripos from St John's College, Cambridge. He topped with a first class first and took a teaching job with Punjab University, Chandigarh. His parents were looking out for a suitable bride for him. Hers were looking for a suitable match for their third daughter. Both were Kohlis, a sub-sect of Kukrains, comprising Anands, Chaddhas, Sahnis and some others, who prefer to marry within the biradari.
They got engaged without ever having seen each other, but were allowed to meet after the engagement. They got married in 1958. No time was wasted on romance. Their first child was on the way almost immediately after their marriage.
The couple liked life in Chandigarh. They built themselves a small villa with a garden space in Sector 11, within walking distance of the university campus, and planned to settle there. That was not to be. In 1961 Manmohan got a scholarship to do a doctorate from Nuffield College, Oxford. This time, he took his wife and baby daughter with him.

I asked her whether she joined some institution for further studies. "No," she replied, "we always had a stream of relatives and friends descending on us. All my time was taken up making chapatis and cooking dal. Whether it was Oxford, Chandigarh, New York, Bombay, Delhi or elsewhere, for me it was the kitchen."
Though the cliche describes the wife as the better half, a more fitting description for Gursharan would be to say that she played second fiddle—caretaker and cook for her husband and three daughters. Though she did not go to a finishing school, she imbibed some western sophistication when Manmohan was with UNCTAD in New York for three years, professor at the Delhi School of Economics for three years, governor of the Reserve Bank of India in Bombay, and finance minister, before becoming the prime minister of India.But the image of Gursharan as just a housewife would be deceptive: she is also the power behind the throne.
The two make an ideal couple in the Indian tradition: strictly loyal to each other, with an abiding faith in their Gurus and religious traditions. I asked her whether she had ever questioned the existence of God. She looked uneasy and replied: "How can anyone? Our Gurus taught us to believe in God." I changed the subject.
"How did you take to Upinder's decision to marry a Hindu?" I asked. She conceded that they resisted it initially, but gave in because she was quite determined to marry him and he was a nice person.

When Manmohan was back at the Delhi School of Economics, they bought a flat in Ashok Vihar, a congested, middle-class colony. There was a peepal tree across the road which soon had a temple built around it—clanging bells, conch shells blowing, hymns being chanted almost round the clock. "We could not work or sleep. So we gave it to Upinder and her husband and shifted to a professor's quarters at the Delhi School of Economics. We were lucky. In November 1984, a mob of goondas tried to set fire to it, shouting: 'Sikh ka makaan hai, jalaa do.' Vijay Tankha stepped out and confronted the mob, shouting back: 'This is my house. I am a Hindu.' The mob didn't touch it."
"Kum aa gaya Hindu jamaee—so the Hindu son-in-law came in handy," I said. She laughed, "Haan kum aa gaya."
It is their religion that has taught them the virtues of humility and uncompromising honesty. It is hard to believe that after the positions he has held, all they own today is their little home in Chandigarh and a DDA flat in Delhi. (He bought an apartment in Guwahati only to qualify as a voter and be elected to the Rajya Sabha.)
It is harder to believe that with a modest education, Gursharan Kaur is able to discharge the duties expected to be performed by the wife of a prime minister with such accomplishment and grace. She is a person of great dignity, speaks very well in Hindi, Punjabi and English, exudes warmth, and makes everyone feel comfortable.
The interview lasted over an hour. I ran out of questions. She asked me: "Can I leave now?"
"This time I did not ask you to go," I replied.