Covering Bollywood and the Hindi Cinema

A.R. Rahman needs no introduction and simply put, the man is a musical genius! Here are some excerpts from an interview to IANS where Rahman talks about his historic performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles:

On How It All Got Started:
"They had been trying to contact us for the past year. Finally I let them on to my events manager."When I was earlier honoured at the Hollywood Bowl in 2000, they told me it was going to be a non-Indian audience. But a lot of Asians came, which was fantastic. But that process of reaching out to a global audience happened this time at the Hollywood Bowl."

On His Global Appeal:
"Eighty percent of the audience was non-Indian. More than an endorsement of my music it was an acknowledgement of our entire film industry. I hate to call Hindi cinema 'Bollywood'. But that's what we represented at the Hollywood Bowl.”

On Staying True To His Roots:
"The doubts that I had about our music being appealing to the West were finally cleared. Our sincerity was quite clear to them. It took me years to get unapologetic about our music in front of a western audience. I now realise that the gift god has given me is the gift that I need to use to the fullest in front of audiences in any part of the world.”

 "That's exactly what I did at the Hollywood Bowl that evening. My musicians and I for the first time felt such pride in doing our own thing. I started the evening with 'Bombay Dreams' which the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra performed, followed by 'Dil Se', 'Rang De Basanti' etc. Then we did choral arrangements of my songs from Mani Ratnam's films with a group called Global Rhythms.”