Happy birthday to the only god I know

Be proud to be a human being, specially those of our generation, since we grew up with the god, the buddha of music, the true genius I have ever heard off. To start with let me remember the time when he first came in picture. That will be the best way to look at the ocean from a naive point of view. But when you are looking at Rahman , all of us are naive. I always give music and art as higher position than science or anyother thing. Music is the most ancient form of human expression and human understanding. With rationality irrationality , with dualism non dualism you can always associate music with it. And music is the only thing that is there in every thing in this world, not god nor science or some metaphysical entity. And if you search for the human being who has understood this infinite storage of music to some extent, your search ends at Rahman.

Rahman is a deconstructionist. He came to world music when it was going through a bad phase. Euroepan music lost its charm, american music was reducing to either loud headbanging or naked girl dancing, arabic music didnt have any innovator , african and carribean music was losing its path on only rap and indian music as usual corrupted by the north indian musical motifs. I will specially give strong importance to the Indian film music version. I can go to the extent to claim that when ARR came, the only music composer worthy of a mention was Ilaya Raja. And the other music composers in Bombay was as usual dumb to explore any other musical motifs other than the banal motif of indian dholakiya , and western (italian or russian ) style orchestra violin. There was a Bappi Lahiri, who is a disgrace on music, There was a anu malik, who had one leg on his father era and one hand in popular western music ( to copy), jatin lalit ( they did some good stuff, but nothing new).The non film music idustry in india sucked . The T-Series boom gave room to some worthless singers like kumar sanu and anuradha padowal, but at the end of the day, forget about the music quality, even the recording quality decreased considerably. Some of the elders i talked even said that the bhojpuri songs of those days sounded better than the hindi songs. Given Rahmans quest for new things he would have come and broken the old trend completely and would have given a completely new definition of music. Actually he has done that , if you consider the quality of Indian music now and before Roja. But still Roja was not a destruction of the old tradition, it was the realisation of old tradition but also creating everything new around. He gave Indian music many new dimensions , infinitely many at one stroke called Roja. I can recall the effect of Roja in Kolkata (that time Calcutta). I have few human beings to check out when music comes in question. My grandmother, my father , my brother and my cousin. My mother doesnt count since she always like something new. But my father , being grown up at in the genration of RDB and Salil Choudhury, was very skeptical about new musical forms during that time. But Rahman changed everything. I remember the strong debate I used to have with my father ( the only debate I had ever with him) , about who is better, Rahman or Burman. But his approval of Rahman being a contender of the versatility of RDB made me really happy since he ruled out the other composer Salil Choudhury. But anyway he was the one to buy me all the Rahman albums from his monthly saving. My grandmother was bowled over by Rahman, just like me, who , after all this years always feel the child like thrill when the african motif starts in dil hai chhota sa before the second antara with the base guitar bakcground.

To talk about Rahman is not a thing which I can do in my life. All these years, the only thing that didnt change in India is Rahmans quest for change and experimentation. The Rahman of Roja is still young, younger than any Indian , younger than any human being. Be his latest works with leit Motif in RDB, Boys, Jane tu ya Jane na, Slum Dog Millionaire, or his jazzy work of Sathiya , or Hindustani Motif Bose the forgotten hero or synthetic music Yuva. In this world there is only one religion and that is music and Rahman is our God. Happy Birthday ARR.