A.R. Rahman: The Genius Who Took Indian Music Global | Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF | Ep 15

Rahman’s mother functioned as the ‘first institution’ behind his career.

After his father died when he was nine, his mother rented out musical equipment to survive, refused to sell his father’s gear, and later pushed Rahman to start playing professionally—turning crisis into a pathway.

A private sandbox accelerates originality.

He describes Panchathan Studio as empowering because nobody judged his experiments; unlike big studios where peers watched, his home studio let him iterate until the music matched his standards.

Roja’s “trend change” was intentional global positioning, not luck.

Rahman aimed to solve why Indians listened to Pink Floyd/Queen/John Williams but “they don’t listen to us,” citing language, production, recording quality, and vibe—then engineered his sound accordingly.

Sustained relevance comes from resisting overproduction and constantly re-learning.

He limited film output early (contrasting peers doing “thirty movies a year”) to protect creative growth, later “escaped” to London/Hollywood to study and refresh his artistic vocabulary.

In an AI world, winning means being creatively contrarian.

Rahman argues AI learns patterns from the past, so artists must surprise the predictive model—changing structure, keys, rhythms, or narrative pacing to create what cannot be easily averaged or replicated.

AI needs human-set ‘rules,’ because economic harm can mirror physical harm.

He compares uncontrolled AI to handing out a gun: even without violence, it can “pull the carpet off” workers by erasing livelihoods, so leaders must constrain deployment and create alternatives before disruption.

Live and immersive experiences will gain value as content becomes cheap.

As screens flood daily life, Rahman expects concerts, musical theatre, symphonies, and immersive venues (Sphere-like formats, domes, scent/haptics/ambisonic sound) to matter more because they restore community and sensory awe.