Congrats to Slumdog Millionaire and A.R. Rahman!

It is celebration time for Bollywood and India. The top maestro A.R Rahman has won the Best Music Composer award for the unique background score for the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.

The 14th annual Critics’ Choice awards in America also had the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ winning a total of five awards, with director Danny Boyle winning the Best Director award, writer Simon Beaufoy, also won an award for the film and actor Dev Patel added another trophy to his credit with the young actor/actress award.

About friggin’ time the ‘Western world’ recognized this Indian maestro genius who has been around for most of my life and delivered some of the greatest music in Indian cinema. Considering the widening diaspora and popularity of Indian movies (and Slumdog certainly fits the category of being the complete package), it’s been long time coming! And Slumdog Millionaire is not even anywhere close to his best compositions.

It’s tough to select the best A.R. songs … Someone has put together their best20 tracks of A.R. Rahman onYoutube

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Obviously it is missing a lot of other language and dialect tracks besides Hindi that A.R. has composed, not that I am going to pretend to be completely aware of them.

This is my favorite A.R. Rahman song from the movie Dil Se in 1998 –

There’s a part in it that goes like “Dil hai to phir dard hoga (If one has a heart, it would inevitably hurt), Dard hai to phir bhi hoga (And likewise if one feels pain, one must have a heart), mausam guzarte hi rahete dil se… (nonetheless the seasons just keep passing by)

And these come close:

What’s your favorite A.R. song?

(And pardon me if I have forgotten to mention more of his gems).

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