1992, North Malabar. My school was 15 min walk away from home. On the way back one day, once I heard a strange but electrifying music from a nearby sound shop selling film music cassettes. It was Puthu Vellai Mazhai from Roja. On a mundane dry afternoon with zero entertainment, the music gave me irrational hope. It was AR Rahman’s first. The movie poster was familiar, the visuals were unconventional those days. The exuberant feeling of an AR Rahman’s music release repeated for a long time. Later he repeated his style and became predictable- but won global accolades. In the first decade of his career, he created breakthrough music, which transcends beyond time. He truly disrupted Indian film music with multi-genre blending, new voices, technology, fusion, and sound engineering. He composed through distilling the world music. Sufi to Carnatic, Arabic to Western Classical, Gujarati folklore to African Samba, melody to trance music – making it a marijuana you can never get rid of. He locks his door and stayed up for several nights together to create music which moves us- the more you listen, the more you crave for it. The progressive rhythms and percussion with experimentative sounds made his music full of celebration, soul-searching, and surprising discoveries.
Let me make my obsession with his music clear: His music is monumental, built for next thousand years.