Indian music director AR Rahman's score for Slumdog Millionaire has won an Oscar for best music, and a second for best song. The BBC's Soutik Biswas discusses what makes Rahman tick. The curiously named Panchathan Record Inn is a nondescript building tucked away in the thriving film district of the southern Indian city of Madras (Chennai). The backyard music studio is also AR Rahman's atelier.
"We make a lot of noise here," one of Rahman's assistants told me wryly when I paid a visit a few years ago. It was late in the evening, and trombone loops floated down the stairs from the state-of-the art studio above.
The "noise" has now conquered the world.
Seventeen years after he began writing music and songs for films, the jingle maker-turned-musician has finally got recognition as India's first truly global film music composer with his score for Danny Boyle's sleeper hit Slumdog Millionaire.
The score is an untidy smorgasbord of hip hop, Bollywood remix and signature pop anthem. But it works because it follows the film's giddy pace, the darkness of its characters, its portrayal of lives on the edge.