Of late A R Rahman is not doing the kind of work he was most closely identified with. A sense of ennui, déjà vu, and dare one say,mediocrity has crept into his work.
Now in the course of one evening last weekend Rahman has lost thousands of fans.
His catastrophic concert Markuma Nenjum in Chennai has lost Rahman a lot more than just fans. All the goodwill that he had garnered over the decades evaporated as he came across as a greedy insensitive artiste who agreed to the concert without verifying the credentials of the organizers.
A young actor from Tamil Nadu and a huge fan of Rahman(“even his mediocre scores in recent years”) gave this writer a firsthand account of what transpired at what will eventually be known as Rahman’s Waterloo.
Describing the bedlam at the concert, the young actor says, “It was a nightmare. There were thousands of attendees with no one to look after them. I could see women and children crying helplessly. Many were openly cursing Rahman. You see, when you attend a Rahman or a Nick Jonas concert and things go horribly wrong, as they did at Rahman’s concert, you don’t look for scapegoats to blame.”
The actor was referring to Rahman’s tweet post the fiasco: “Let me be the sacrificial goat this time for all of us to wake up.”
Sacrificial goat? Rahman should stop this plastic persecution and own up to the fiasco. Lives could have been lost. If they were not, we have no one to thank except God, which Rahman is not any longer , even for his diehard fans.