New Delhi - India's music industry on Monday celebrated the Golden Globe win for its most famous music composer AR Rahman and hoped it would be the Oscar next. Rahman won the award on Sunday for best musical score for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, a film about a Mumbai slum boy who wins a game show.
"He will not stop here. I am sure he will win an Oscar too. He has put Indian music on top of the world. From here the future looks good and Rahman is solely responsible," music director Shankar Mahadevan of the Shankar-Eshaan-Loy trio was quoted as saying by PTI news agency.
"Many of Rahman's compositions are better than any international track. He deserved this honour long back," Sukhvinder Singh who sang the winning score Jai Ho in Slumdog Millionaire said.
Dubbed the Mozart of Madras, the former name of his birthplace Chennai, AR Rahman is one of India's most successful music composers.
A versatile composer, Rahman creates scores that are often a fusion of two or more oeuvres ranging from Western and Indian classical music, jazz, folk, rap and hip hop.
Rahman has a penchant for combining traditional musical instruments with electronic sounds and experiments with different technologies.
Born in 1966 in Chennai, Rahman was known as AS Dileep Kumar till his family converted to Islam in the 1970s and renamed him Allah Rakha Rahman.
His father died while he was quite young, and the family had to rent out musical instruments to get by.
The talented Rahman, however, learnt traditional Indian classical music from an early age, and won a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London where he got a degree in Western classical music.
He has numerous Bollywood hits began with the songs of Roja, a film about a kidnapping in Kashmir, which was released in 1991.
Roja saw Rahman's transition from a composer of advertisement jingles and television and documentary scores to Bollywood and feature films in which he has worked consistently ever since.
He composed the score for a Chinese film Warriors on Heaven and Earth and a piece for violinist Vannessa Mae called Raga's dance.
He composed the music for Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Bombay Dreams and for the stage adaptation of Lord of the Rings in which he collaborated with Finnish folk music band Varttina.
Rahman has also done music scores for half a dozen Hollywood films, but it took Slumdog Millionaire to get him the international attention his many fans in the industry feel he deserves.
