Celebrating AR Rahman: Chennai’s film fraternity roots for ‘99 Songs’

“It looks like an English film.” That’s what Tamil filmmaker Shankar had to say about the trailer and numbers from AR Rahman’s 99 Songs.

And that is exactly what Rahman’s mother, the late Kareema Begum, commented as well when she first caught it. “Three years ago, I showed her a 30-minute edit of the film. She’s the kind who gives frank feedback. She finished watching it, thought hard for a while and said: ‘It looks like an English film’,” recalled a nostalgic Rahman, during the launch of the Tamil version in Chennai on Friday evening.

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99 Songs, which not only has music by Rahman but is also written by him, has been ready for quite a while but its release dates kept getting pushed. It is finally hitting theatres on April 16. “It is about the struggles of a boy against the old and new world. I wanted to do a film produced from Chennai and give it to everyone. The kind of talent in the Chennai artistic community is so great that it inspires me,” said Rahman.

The evening saw the who’s who of the film fraternity — from filmmakers KS Ravikumar, SJ Suryah to stars like Sivakarthikeyan — expressing their love for the composer. But the highlight of the evening was how three leading Tamil composers — Yuvan Shankar Raja, Anirudh and GV Prakash — got together on stage to wish the Oscar winner on his new innings. “Kaadhalan’s songs were a big inspiring point for me to pursue music,” recalled Anirudh, who had a recent superhit musical outing in Vijay-starrer Master, “During my school days, we were Rahman veriyans. We used to buy more than one cassette of the same film because they would give up on us after repeated use. During a school culturals, he encouraged Leon [composer Leon James] and me and that gave us the inspiration to take up music.”

While GV Prakash has dubbed for the Tamil version of 99 Songs for the lead character (played by Ehan Bhat), filmmaker Gautham Menon has worked on it as well. “I’ve seen the journey of this film from close quarters,” he said, “The songs have a lot of importance, and meaning in this storyline. It’s offbeat, quirky and has a beautiful commercial element to it.”