Inspirations

From hearing Roja for the first time on my uncle’s music deck to getting the chance to meet him and work with him — he has been the single biggest influence on how I understood and appreciated music.

And not just that. Even after my stint with him and his studios, he kept showing up with his kindness.

There was a time he handed over his audio monitors to me when I couldn’t afford to buy them.

He helped release my first ever album, Amhi Puneri. A few years later, he released the soundtrack of my first feature film, Nayakan, at his residence.

And as recently as my last film work, he had words of appreciation and a few tips to get better.

Happy and grateful to have him as my mentor.

Preeti, my younger sister, has been the single biggest reason I am in music today.

Learning tabla was one thing. Having the confidence to get into music came from her.

When I’d come home from my tabla lessons, she would be learning to sing.

I would lose track of time, just listening, as she sang and danced.

I watched in awe at the gifted voice she had, and it inspired me to do more.

I had a real reason to make music — something for her to sing on.

That, I think, is one of the reasons I got into composition in the first place. I needed a track for her to record on.

Back then, I didn’t know how to play any melodic instruments, and I couldn’t record tabla.

But knowing VST instruments, Sound Forge, sampling, editing — I could patch things together to make a small 30-second track and record vocals on it.

From there, no looking back.

She is also my favourite person to collaborate with. Many of our works, inside film and outside, have been together.

Back when films were passed around on pen drives and burned CDs, one of them landed in my hands: Ray.

That was the first time I learned about this musician who would change the way I approach music.

Until then, I had boxed myself in. I hadn’t formally learned music.

I wasn’t fit, I thought, to lead or produce music professionally.

Watching that film, and later reading his book and learning about his life, inspired me to double down on what I’m uniquely known for — who I am, and how I am.

I accepted that state of being and kept making music for the love of it. And then doubled down on it even more.

For the longest time, I didn’t even know his name. I just knew his music made something shift inside me.

Once I learned who he was, I went down the rabbit hole of his ocean of work — and like any kid mesmerised by ocean waves, I was mesmerised by every second of it.

He has shaped a lot of my musical choices for background score — the way he blended ideas, the twists and turns in his arrangements, and how he used the most common sounds to make something exotic and dramatic.

I learned that from his work.

In early 2004 (late 2003, I think), I was introduced to Nitin Sawhney by friends from my sound engineering course.

The first track I heard was The Conference — a tabla, percussion, and vocal jugalbandi that blew my head off.

As a tablist, a tabla lover, and a percussion lover, I went down the rabbit hole of his work. He quietly replaced Rahman as the artist who most influenced my musical choices.

His production aesthetics, his choice of instruments, his choice of vocalists, his arrangements, his album releases — all of it has shaped my music career.

He is easily the number one guy I look up to.

The day is not far off when I’ll meet him — just like I met Rahman 20 years ago — and make that dream of collaborating with him real.

Babel was the first work of his I came across, and I was mesmerised by how he used his string instruments.

I was desperate to recreate the charango sound he used in his scores. I used to get my musician friends in India to tune down their guitars just to chase that sound.

I’d use it for guitar arrangements and guitar-based scores.

I have learned a lot from Gustavo Santaolalla — especially the tenderness and delicateness in his arrangements.

His scores, his live sessions, his game work, his independent releases — all truly remarkable.

If I know anything today about how to arrange or blend guitars, it’s because his chipset has been loaded into my head. I can only think about guitars from his perspective.

My very first music teacher. My tabla teacher.

I learned tabla under him for eight years, and while I didn’t turn out to be his best or greatest student, I was certainly a unique one.

It might sound funny now, but I could never lift my middle finger when I had to play the tabla.

On the dugga, you need to hit with the middle finger, and on the right you need to lift it up — I could never get it in sync.

He was very patient with me.

He taught me a lot about patience itself, along with the basics of tabla, which became the grounding framework for everything I understand today about timing, rhythm, and percussive confluence.

Emmy Sir was a legendary sound engineer who worked with the likes of Ilaiyaraaja and other legends from that era.

When I was working with Rahman on his projects, I was assigned to work under him during the build of his new studio.

He was hot-headed with those who didn’t live up to his expectations, and very kind to those who were true, genuine, and hardworking.

I was a little scared of him, honestly.

But I was fortunate enough to learn a lot from his stories and from his approach to work and life.

During my bachelor days in Chennai, I was learning the ropes of sound.

I travelled the length and depth of the city with him, meeting sound vendors and every kind of vendor involved in building what is today the AM Studios.

I’m super grateful to him for being kind and patient with me, and for being that father figure when I needed it most — when I was missing my parents.

Yotam was one of my first bosses in the music field, and it was a very unusual job.

I loved how he approached the work, how he approached people, how he approached his team.

The comfort of working with him was more present than the feeling of working under him.

I learned a lot about music editing and music mixing from him.

One of my oldest music friends.

We bonded over our love for Rahman’s music, and we both had this shared desire to make music.

He’s the one who reached out after he learned I had a so-called bedroom music studio.

We met, started our friendship over songs from Lagaan, and from there we never looked back.

In the final years of my college education, he convinced my parents and took me to Chennai to meet legendary music composers — from Suresh Peters to SPB to Deva, and just about everyone.

He gave me a taste of what it meant to be in the music field. A super kind-hearted guy.

We had a big vision of working together on music projects.

When I got my first chance to work on a film, I collaborated with him — we did just one short film together with Bejoy.

That was the end of it, because of creative differences and logistical issues. But his influence in my life cannot be undone.

An acquaintance from my sound engineering days.

He was the first musician I came across who had great taste in music and could express it in an interesting way — sounds, melodies, what is happening inside a track — all through his wonderful, soulful voice.

I learned a lot about chords from him back in the day. It was alien to me then, and still feels almost alien now.

The way he could strip a track down and talk about the chords and the notes being rendered over it helped me a lot in how I listen to and approach music production.

He has been a kind mentor and friend to me in a musical sense.

He was part of a lot of my earlier random indie projects, and he has been a great influence on my musical choices.

If I am even half as smart as I am today in terms of business sense — whether it’s how business on the street works or how business in books works — he is the single biggest reason.

He taught me a lot about running a business: managing a team, having an office, running something profitable.

I’ve been through his worst phase and his best phase.

I have learned a lot from his stories, his hustle, his kindness, and how welcoming he was to his world.

His studio was the first place I worked from when I started doing film work.

Bejoy has been the biggest catalyst for me stepping into the world of business.

Another brilliant person, another brilliant soul, who gave me the opportunity to make music for films.

He had made a few short films, and I got the chance to work on them.

This was at the peak of my radio career. After my day job, I would come in the evening and work on these films.

He also had a full-time tech career, and he would do these films on his off days.

Some of what we did worked. Ideas just flew in.

One of his films was the first short film I composed a song for — if I’m not mistaken, it was called Stalemate.

That was the start of me composing scores and songs for films, and it was through him that I got introduced to Bejoy Peter.

The late Sunil Nair — who trusted and believed in me and gave me my earliest jingles to work on.

They were for local businesses in Pimpri-Chinchwad and Pune.

Even though they were for small brands and local consumption — local cable TV ads, small jingles — he treated every one of them like the next big blockbuster.

That gave me a lot of vision, and it was one of the first times I scored music to visuals.

It shaped a lot of what I do and how I do it.

I’m ever grateful to this departed soul for having blessed me and my musical career.

Bejoy and I were both part of this Yahoo group called the A. R. Rahman Fans Club — one of the biggest groups for Rahman fans.

I used to post on it very rarely, but when I did, it was usually something of my own work, or an insight, or a post I had written.

I never knew Bejoy was in the group, and I think he also didn’t know I was in it.

One of the works I shared in the group was something he happened to hear, and he loved it.

He sent me an appreciation email — but somehow it landed in a forgotten corner of my inbox and I missed it. I only saw it months later.

Fast forward four years.

I was in Kannur for an Ayurvedic treatment when another email from him landed in my inbox.

He said he was working on a film and wanted me to score it.

At first I thought it was some kind of prank, so I let it sit.

Then I went digging into my archives, found that old email I had missed, read it, and finally made sense of it.

I called him. From there, we started working together.

That was the first film with proper stars and proper production that I ever worked on.

The film was Rahu, and it set the foundation for me getting into the world of cinema — scoring for soundtracks and songs.

From there on, he was kind enough to give me my first film proper — Shaitan — which is actually the first film I signed up for.

It released third in the sequence, but it was the first I committed to.

I can never thank him enough for trusting me and giving me that opportunity.

Not just professionally. At a personal level, he has been kind on many fronts.

During the worst phase of my life, he helped me emotionally and financially.

He has been that silent guiding light whom I have not acknowledged enough publicly. He knows how much value he holds in my life.

Bejoy and Lijo were part of a film-making competition on Sony, and that’s how Lijo got introduced to my work — through one of the songs I did for Bejoy’s short film.

Lijo reached out, we met, and there was no looking back.

That was my step into Malayalam films.

His was the first Malayalam film I signed up for, Nayakan, and I am ever grateful to him for that.

We bonded very well — we’re both Virgos, and somehow our quirks, tastes, preferences, and the way we approach life and work just align.

That human-to-human bonding shaped our professional career too.

We ended up doing so many films together, and none of them felt like work.

It was just a confluence of ideas, a confluence of two different worlds.

Like Bejoy, he has been a great support during both my best and worst phases. And I think vice versa too.

My work with him has always been looked up to, and is still held up as a cult benchmark.

That’s purely his genius — going into the depths of my creative mind and showing me what’s possible, giving me the vision to come up with that sound.

His influence, along with Bejoy’s, has shaped a lot of the film scores I’ve done in my career, even outside the projects I worked on with them.

The guy who taught me the art of being creative as a radio jockey.

During one of his training sessions, he suggested all kinds of ideas for coming up with new concepts for promos and ads — going to a different restaurant for lunch, changing desks, switching off the lights and thinking in the dark, doing things that weren’t part of the daily office routine.

On top of that, his voice casting tips helped me later, not just in radio but in the choices I make when I pick singers and instrumentalists.

Learnt a lot about creative radio production and programming from him.

That helped later — when I was managing a station, hosting events, and even doing my own live shows.

The principles I picked up during his sessions stayed.

A champion voice. A great jock. A superb human being.

I learned a lot from him about radio presenting and being a great articulator behind the mic.

The master of radio production and programming.

His ideas on using audio in a thousand creative ways — saving seconds and microseconds — taught me a lot about editing, mixing, and mastering.

His daily blog has inspired me a lot.

It was one of the reasons I got into daily blogging back in 2009.

His perspective and insights aligned with a lot of what I was already thinking about, and as a marketing student, it helped me quickly embrace his ideas.

I’ve probably embraced them in a lot of my musical work too.

I got introduced to Gary around the end of 2013.

I started watching a lot of his content — not for the regular fluff, but for the actionable words of wisdom.

How he led his team, how he led as a human being, inspired me and laid the groundwork for everything I was going to do to build my career and my identity — not just in music, but outside it too.

He is the OG, path-breaking mentor of my career.

The master of not just great guest curation, but of deep, high-quality questions.

That particular knack of his unlocked a lot of insights for me when I was going through certain phases of my creative career and life.

It wasn’t about the answers the guests gave. The answers were great.

But the way he asked his questions helped me articulate my own thoughts better.

That alone has broken a lot of shackles in my head and given me clearer thinking.

I discovered him in early 2014, when my quest to build something online was on a rampage.

His podcast — Smart Passive Income — and every single guest he covered, every personal story he shared, every journey he opened up about, inspired me a lot.

His own path of growing a personal brand and business quietly shaped mine.

His perspectives on being creative and thinking like an artist have been very valuable in my journey — not just for my music career, but also for helping me become a better parent.

The little nuggets of wisdom he shares consistently in his newsletter have made me a more mindful parent, nudging my child’s creative instincts in the right direction and helping her express more freely and become an artist herself.

Just one core piece of advice from him — to 10x the product pricing — helped me scale to six-figure revenue.

I also love his perspectives on entrepreneurship and life.

At the peak of my misery, at the lowest point in my life, a book on my mum’s bookshelf changed my life.

It is the only book I’ve read cover to cover: The Other Side of Me.

His personal life story — full of wisdom, insights, doubts, and apprehensions — shone a light into the tunnel of darkness I was in.

I’ve kept his life and his model as a North Star whenever I go through a bad phase or a bad patch.

The Alchemist was one of those books I read in a couple of sittings.

The spiritual mysticism I’m drawn to in it, and his world of writing, made me feel like I belong.

I’ve been a fan ever since.

Without Feathers and his films flipped my head inside out.

His weird, eccentric style of filmmaking — from grim, gritty films to his extremely witty and insightful writing in his books — has shaped my thinking about humour in life.

His creative choices when it comes to music have completely changed how I think about music for films too, especially the Midnight in Paris soundtrack.

His ideas on education, creativity, learning, and his own personal life story — the relentless quest for excellence — have influenced a lot of how I present, whether on stage or on video.

I can feel his influence when I speak.

The world she inhabits is mostly unknown to me, which is exactly why she draws me in.

What Woody Allen is to me as a man, Tina Fey is to me as a woman — extremely witty, extremely insightful, extremely funny.

I’ve binged her podcast and watched a lot of her interviews.

A lot of her nuggets of wisdom have inspired me in my work and life.

This is an unusual one.

At one phase in my life, when I was going through the motions and looking for answers, a couple of things she wrote completely changed the way I look at how I live my day — forget my life.

From that day on, I started prioritising health, the way I think about health, and the way I think about my time.

She is one of the great catalysts in my life.