The Score Magazine - Archive Aug-Sept 2016 issue! | Page 18

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? 16 The Score Magazine www.thescoremagazine.com 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