STILL IN SCORING POSITION

A.R. Rahman looks back at his journey, from Rangeela to Mimi

- Akhila Krishnamurthy

In nearly every film that credits A.R. Rahman for its music, there is one song that is a statement piece, the showstopper. Over the years, we have all come to expect this song to unfurl in the magical voice of Rahman himself. This song—a monologue of sorts—invariably begins on a high-pitched note and traverses the entire scale, visiting a gamut of emotions, becoming in a sense, a metaphor for life. As we listen to it, the song transcends from the personal to the universal.

In Mimi (2021, Netflix), this song is ‘Rihaayi de’. It arrives at a climactic moment—Mimi, a surrogate mother, has just been abandoned by her child’s American parents. Over a Zoom call from his hotel in Dubai, where he is working on music for the Dubai Expo, Rahman clarifies that even though ‘Rihaayi de’ has tugged at our hearts, it was ‘Param Sundari’, Mimi’s opening track, that came first. He says, “I remember how a bunch of us were going back and forth on Zoom. I suggested we meet in person. That’s the magic of being together; it got me in the zone and ‘Param Sundari’ was born. Though it is an item song, we created it like a launch song of sorts, one that is respectful of the idea of dreams, both of the protagonist and of [Kriti] Sanon herself, whose career is at the cusp of taking flight.”

Since the start of his career, when he first broke into Bollywood with his iconic