__VanthiyaDevan__

one customer the best startup i know of ran out of a backyard in madras and at its height it had one customer. the customer was not easy. he was a film director who shot beauty for a living and refused everything on principle and he found the founder where all the great partnerships of the nineties began, at an advertising awards night. the founder was a quiet man in his twenties who wrote jingles, thirty seconds at a time, in a recording room behind his house he named panchathan record inn, which is a great deal of name for a room. the customer listened and handed him a film, roja, the famous one. before the first film had even opened, the customer had already put him to work on a second. the founder's name was a. r. rahman. you have heard of him. the customer was mani ratnam. he is the reason you have. ask me for the most pivotal album of the last thirty years and i will answer before you finish and it goes past the oscars and the famous one to that second film. it was about thieves. so was its title. a train full of freshly printed currency is relieved of it and two village pickpockets end up holding the problem. it came out at diwali in 1993 and did what films do, came and went. the album never went. this diwali it turns thirty-three and the songs have not aged a day. it is the nature of a heist picture that something gets stolen. in this one it was the film, lifted clean by its own songs. there are six of them and no two live in the same country. a peace anthem, in the middle of a heist, asking for a brand-new earth. a techno track called konjam nilavu that the whole world calls chandralekha, sung by a voice named annupamaa that nobody had heard before and nobody has confused since. thee thee, built on a jingle for an ad that never aired, his rejects were better than the industry's releases. and one, rasathi, for which he sent the instruments home. voices only, he said. and in a backyard in madras, tamil film music learned the word a cappella. the trade never recovered. amit trivedi, who scores hindi films now, tells of hearing it as a schoolboy, wearing out the cassette and thinking, how can someone think like this. children who hear it still go out and buy keyboards and the ones who grow up to score films are all chasing a sound a twenty-six-year-old got out of a room behind his house. the customer had come to the backyard from ilaiyaraaja, which is roughly like leaving bach. he has never left anybody since. each of his films after that has gone to that startup, including the one arriving this january. out of it came dil se, then a film called guru, which i take personally, then the best thirty years of listening i know of. the startup is still a startup. it went international without opening a branch and the industry has spent three decades rearranging itself around one room. i watched the film seven saturdays in a row the year i was sixteen. i have been sixteen about it ever since.