A beautiful mind - By Dr R. Karthikeyan Rahman has a beautiful mind-a mind blessed with love, warmth, sensitivity, flexibility, passion and purpose. And he has the most valuable trait of an intelligent being-adaptation! What makes him extraordinary? He exercises 'choice' in all critical times of his life and career. When Roja was a runaway hit, he chose not to sign too many Tamil movies. He chose the right projects, chose to give extra time to sound them different, chose quality against quantity, chose long gestation period to wait for big projects and chose his music to transgress every culture-from Tamil to Hindi to English. No wonder, he is chosen to work with the best minds in the film and music industry.
His choice of love over hate, as he said in his acceptance speech, is a candid expression of his fertile personality aligned in deep spiritual harmony with music and God. His core values, if you can gather by the little aperture he provides you fleetingly, are: being at peace with oneself, finding meaning and a sense of fulfilment in his creation, and a smooth detachment from the fruit of labour-be it criticism or fanfare. His simplicity is genuine and is an expression of his total surrender to the higher order. On careful psychological analysis, I am confident he would match most of the traits Abraham Maslow conceptualised as those of a 'self actualised person'. A creative genius becoming a huge commercial success is rare. His ability to produce interesting sounds matches his ability to see the unseen markets that any Indian music director dared to see. This nation with permeable borders of culture provided a good setting for this experimenter. Rahman is an inspirational story and a living hope for all the children struggling with the three R's in concentration camps called schools-that an ability pursued with passion would lead to fulfilment and success!
