Prashant Ivaturi

  I rarely review music albums. But when two music geniuses like Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman come together, I couldn't stay away. I was instantly curious about how this monumental collaboration would turn out for a story as close to everyone’s hearts as the Ramayana . Composing for an epic like this is a massive tightrope walk: blending Hollywood grandeur with Indian traditional music, retaining sacred reverence, and keeping it contemporary enough to appeal to current and future generations. As much of an honor as it would have been to be part of this historical project, I don't envy the team's immense expectations. Phew! You get the flow.  The Scale of the Project Namit Malhotra - founder of the Oscar-winning visual effects company DNEG ( Interstellar , Blade Runner 2049 , Dune: Part Two ) - is bringing Valmiki’s Ramayana to the screen with grand visual effects. But my focus today is the music. After three and a half years in the making, the album dropped on October 21st,...

Sometimes, someone else believes in you before you learn to believe in yourself. Many years ago, we were in Belgaum, Karnataka. I had just completed kindergarten. And we learnt that my father was being transferred to a village near Hazaribagh (in what was then Bihar). However, when we moved there, I had to repeat kindergarten because it wasn't taught in Belgaum. My mother, who coincidentally was a Hindi teacher, took it upon herself to teach me the language at home. And while I learnt Hindi that year, I lost a year repeating the same grade. Meanwhile, my mother came up with an idea.   She wanted me to get admission into a higher grade in Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) (a school that had branches nationally so that the curriculum would remain the same and movement would be easier) so that I could make up for the lost year.   There was only one KV close to where we lived in Hazaribagh. The school was inside a defense forces campus, some 20+ kilometres away from home, with another two-...