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AR Rahman, who is considered as the maestro of music in India, marked his debut as a music director with the 1992 film Roja. When the movie opened to positive reviews in Tamil, it was dubbed in several other languages including Hindi. For the Hindi version, director Mani Ratnam and music director AR Rahman wanted to record songs in the same language. This took them to Indian rapper Baba Sehgal, who later also sang the now iconic song “Rukmani”. Apparently, both Mani Ratnam and AR Rahman were against Baba Sehgal singing the song.
Recalling this whole incident, Baba Sehgal told Siddharth Kannan, “I had a solo show in Chennai with about 50 to 60,000 audience. An organiser told me, ‘sir, a director wants to meet you.’ When he came, he played the Tamil version of Roja song. I heard and I was like, ‘Nice, but why are you making me listen to it?’ I think even AR Rahman was there. He was quite young back then.”
As Baba Sehgal was busy with his concert, he invited the team to meet him later at his hotel. “He came then and told me, ‘Sir, please release this for us’. I forwarded their request to my contacts, and a music company. They then decided to make film music for the first time, but their condition was that one song needs to be sung by me. They wanted to do the Hindi version of Roja. We went to sing the song. Shweta Shetty was the female singer.”
He added, “When we sat to sing, we got the lyrics. When I read the lyrics for ‘Rukmani’, I was like, ‘Kitne waahiyaat lyrics hai yaar? Who wrote this?’ Still I sang. I knew that they didn’t want me to sing the song. They wanted some classical singer to sing it. But because it was a condition put by the audio company, it was a forced thing. Rahman was also there. I was not convinced with the lyrics. They were too vulgar. But the makers didn’t have issues because it was matching their Tamil song. We recorded the song in two takes. Later, they called an old lady to record a particular line, but I fought for Shweta. I made her sing that line as well. That was my first and last song with Rahman. We never met or collaborated again due to language issues. He was a kid then and he is younger than me.”
Baba Sehgal revealed that after a while, he was told that the film’s director Mani Ratnam never wanted him to sing the song. “Later, someone told me that Mani Ratnam didn’t want me to sing that song. But, they can’t deny that song became a hit because of me”, said Baba Sehgal.
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