“Up until 25, I used to think about suicide. Most of us feel they are not good enough. Because I lost my father, there was this void… There were so many things happening. (But) that in a way made me more fearless. Death is a permanent thing for everyone. Since everything created has an expiry date, so why be afraid of anything?” he said.
He spoke about how it affected him and his work. “Because of my father’s death and the way he was working, I didn’t do many movies. If I got 35 offers, I did two movies. Everyone wondered ‘How are you going to survive? You have everything, grab it’… It’s like eating everything. You become numb. So even if you eat small meals, make it fulfilling.”
AR Rahman lost his father when he was 9 years old. While his family struggled over the years, Rahman sought solace in work and began his career writing jingles for advertisements. Rahman’s film-scoring career began during the early 1990s with the Tamil film Roja.
Rahman has a biography out titled ‘Notes of a Dream: The Authorized Biography of AR Rahman’ written by Krishna Trilok. The biography features intimate interviews with the musician as well as insights and anecdotes from key people in his life.
Depression is a mental health disorder that’s characterised by constant depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life. It’s something that needs to be taken seriously, with several celebrities even opening up about battling it including Deepika Padukone, who started the Live Love Laugh Foundation to stop the stigma around mental health disease.
