How hard was it for you in that window when you had just
started singing regularly and then you had to give up your
job to follow your dreams? What kind of parental pressure
followed after?
I had a lot of pressure, crazy amounts of pressure. When I used to go
and record there have been points where people have rejected me,
the way I sing and said “Naah…this is not a great voice” or “You’re
never going to be a singer,” and stuff like that and you have to go
through that because that should trigger to bring out the better in
you, there’s nothing called the best but the even better in you. Even
my parents sometimes were like “What are you doing with your life?”
so I had to fight it and keep the faith. So for me pressure brought
out the even better out of me and I’d say succumbing wouldn’t have
helped and I would have been nowhere. It wasn’t much of a shift;
my plan of coming to India was to become a singer. I fought with my
dad, I argued with him as to why I needed to go to Chennai from Abu
Dhabi when my dad wanted me to get a business degree from Pune
from a good business school like Symbiosis or so and I said “No. I
want to become a singer” and he questioned me “What about your
education?” and I was like I will study just that I need to make my
way through this and I can do it myself and by you telling me what
to do and what not to do is going to confuse me further and I will be
hopeless, I will be pointless and I will be goalless in life. So I had to
fight it and make that choice. We had a cold war for almost a month
and a half, we never spoke to each other much and eventually when
I started recording in movies and songs started doing well and when
the whole world started letting my father and mum know “Oh your
son’s song is beautiful” “He’s done a great job” “How did he meet
Rahman?” and then my father started feeling that I am becoming
important in life and he’s becoming important to the people in the
society. Not in terms of becoming big or humongous but in terms of
marking yourself as a recognized person. And that made my parents
feel that I am actually taking the right steps in life and it was not
through any push or pull through anybody in the industry. I had
nobody to push me.
What is the scene like for someone without a godfather to
survive in the industry?
I’ll tell you something, it is very hard to be honest. Everybody has
honesty in them but some people don’t choose to be honest. You can
show it every day and my thing is, even this interview is me being
honest and I’m not trying to sugarcoat any of my life and if I went
through shit, I went through shit and if I’m having a good time, I’m
having a good time but I am extremely honest about what my life was
and what it should be and I’m not sitting there expecting things to
come to me and make my life wonderful. For me, I am expecting to
improve and that’s a very honest way of saying and is not something
people would like to quote in the papers and read that some other
day. For me, honestly, I just want to become better and I just want to
become more awesome and even when I meet my musician friends
I keep saying that I want to be more awesome. You have to be more
awesome, you have to be blowing everyone away when you perform
and you know that first line you sing on stage should just blow them
away. And I still feel that I haven’t been able to do that for myself.
All of what I am doing is for me and no one else and if I am going to
make myself happy, I’m sure that everyone else is going to see the
resonance of my happiness. So that’s what it is, it’s at a higher level
for me altogether. And thank you for interviewing me because people
get to hear my story.
How come you never went back to acting after By the People?
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I was never serious about acting. I realized that making music is
more my cup of tea. I don’t know, I can’t be so loyal. I need to sleep.
I love to sleep. You have to be there on time, you have to look fresh
and all that takes a lot of dedication and to be very honest I am lazy
in some way and I love to sleep because my voice has to sound great
when I get to the studio. Like how every actor’s face needs to look