Exclusive: AR Rahman Reacts to the New ‘Humma Humma’ Song and More

AR Rahman talks to us about the songs he’ll be playing out on MTV unplugged.

AR Rahman unplugged on The Quint. (Photo courtesy: Facebook)

‘Does the 90s generation like me anymore?’, wonders AR Rahman while chatting with me about a bunch of things including the outrage over the remix of Humma Humma, the new lyrics in Urvasi Urvasi and the failure of Mohenjo Daro. The internationally acclaimed music composer is back on the small screen on Royal Stag Barrel Select MTV Unplugged Season 6, which airs 14 January onwards. The show will have Rahman playing 6 of his popular tracks and we settle down to discuss the songs and stuff related to them.

You can listen to the chat with AR Rahman below or scroll down for the text version:

Q: The hit track Urvasi Urvasi is back in the news for its new lyrics, I want to take you back to the original song and I know the Hindi lyrics better, which had some pretty quirky lines like ‘Chitrahaar mein bijli udd gayi...’ and ‘Bagal seat mein buddhi ho to...’. Which is your favourite line from the original song?

AR Rahman: I think it’s ‘Oosi pola odambu iruntha thevai illa pharmacy...’, which means – ‘if you are thin like a needle you don’t need a doctor’, the first line. The whole thing is beautifully written, the reason why we wanted to update is also because Chitrahaar is not there any more, it’s outdated so we wanted to put new things, so we crowdsourced it. We asked people on Facebook to send in their lines, they came up with some incredible ones, we were flooded with them and we just picked four or five of them.

Q: One of the songs you’ll be singing on MTV Unplugged in Ranjha Ranjha... from Raavan, Mani Ratnam of course visualises your songs beautifully and you’ve composed so many songs over the years, while you are making a certain song do you imagine how they will be shot or visualised by the director or are you completely cut off from that?

ARR: I think it’s the song that inspires them more than the other way round. In this case this is a line which I love, Bulleh Shah’s line, so I tuned this and I played it to Ratnam and it didn’t fit the movie, so even though it didn’t fit it he said, ‘I love the song’ and he’s amazing to he adapts things like that. But in this case it was used very less in the movie and it was more situational, so we took back that and we kept the first line and we expanded on what the real meaning of it is in this version, so the lyrics were re-written.

Q: Aise Na Dekho from Raanjhanaa is a song you sang in the film, how do you choose which song to keep for yourself, when you compose it?

ARR: In this (MTV Unplugged) strangely I wanted to sing everything, because people keep telling me ‘why don’t you sing more, why don’t you sing more’ and I thought it was a great opportunity to do that, so I’ve probably sung in about 5 out of the 6 tracks.

Q: You weren’t very familiar with Hindi when you started off, but you sang for Rangeela the Mangta Hai Kya... song. Were you confident of singing in Hindi at that time or you just went with the flow and said this song is best sung by me?

ARR: No, I think Ramu wanted me to sing it, because he heard the tune and said ‘I think you should sing it’ and I said ‘have you gone mad, it’s Aamir’ and he said ‘no no I’ll take care of that’, so I think he insisted that I should sing it.

Q: Coming to Tu Hai... from Mohenjo Daro, Rahman, I wanted to know - do you invest yourself in a film’s success of failure or do you divest yourself and say that I’ve done the music, the music’s great and now it’s out of my way.

ARR: I think I’ve gone past that zone… if a movie is made with conviction, sometimes it takes time for it to reach people.

Like Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar was a fantastic movie and people were – ‘aaaww I’m so bored’, and now they are like ‘it’s Mani Ratnam’s best film, I watched it 45 times’, people say that. I mean if you are very commercially oriented in mind, you would want success immediately but sometimes a book written 700 years back makes sense now, so I believe in that.

I believe that a certain vibration that a director gets, a story teller gets or a composer gets, doesn’t have to be reached immediately. There is enough money for our bread and butter, which is fine, but we should keep doing things which what we feel comes from within, because what is within is infinite and what you think people need or want is a very limited notion. So I really appreciate what Ashutosh has done. I know at the present stage people are judging it by special effects and this and that but at least he had the courage to make something like that. And he is a very very musically sympathetic filmmaker, he loves sitting for every note and he actually so passionate about the making of the music. I love working with him, so I am not bothered about the success or failure of that movie and I loved working on that track so I wanted to put that on the show.

Q. Lastly coming to OK Jaanu, you must have seen reactions from the entire 90’s generation which grew up on Humma Humma... including me...

ARR: I don’t know whether the 90s generation likes me anymore at all, I’m a new me. (Laughs)

Q: You must have seen all the tweets and outrage - ‘how can you touch Humma Humma!’, I just wanted to know your reaction to the outrage and the track.

ARR: My reaction was, I didn’t judge it as a composer, I judged it by – if I was a today’s kid would I like it? And I heard it and I said it’s going to work and I said - go ahead guys. And I was not involved at all, they just took the song – Badshah and Shaad and they all did it by themselves, and it was such a huge success so I was very happy... I let it go. (Laughs)