Yash Grew Up Dancing to AR Rahman; Now He Shares Ramayana

Yash turned the Bengaluru launch of Ramayana: Rise of a Legend into a full-circle fan moment. The actor, who plays Ravana in Nitesh Tiwari’s epic, told the audience he grew up dancing to AR Rahman’s songs—and now Rahman is composing music for the film he stars in.

The moment mattered because it made a sprawling international collaboration feel personal. Rahman is scoring the film alongside Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, a pairing that has already shaped excitement around the project. But Yash’s memory brought the story back to something simpler: a young fan discovering music that would eventually frame his biggest role.

A fanboy moment on a big stage

Speaking in Kannada at the Bengaluru event, Yash recalled: “We used to dance to AR Rahman’s songs when we were young. Today, he is composing music for my film.”

The actor’s words underline how Rahman’s music can feel like a shared soundtrack for a generation of Indian film fans. To move from dancing to those songs to acting inside a Rahman score is the kind of arc that turns a press event into a story fans repeat.

Rahman’s Bengaluru connection

Yash also shared a behind-the-scenes conversation. Rahman told him he had built his first studio with money earned while working part-time in Bengaluru, “with the money given by Kannadigas.” The composer would come to the city for that early work, Yash recalled.

The anecdote gave Bengaluru a stake in Rahman’s origin story and framed the event as more than routine film promotion. For fans in Karnataka, this was an acknowledgment that the city helped shape a composer who now defines Indian film music globally.

Why the Rahman-Zimmer pairing matters

Yash described the collaboration as a bridge between two different musical worlds. The larger aim, he said, is to present Indian strengths to international audiences while bringing global talent and ideas to Indian viewers.

For the audience, the likely payoff is a score that works on two registers:

• Rahman’s melodic, Indian-rooted sound could carry the epic’s emotional and devotional beats.
• Zimmer’s orchestral muscle could give the film a blockbuster, big-screen scale.
• Yash’s Ravana may get a distinct musical identity as the two composers share the story.

For the audience, the collaboration is more than a marquee name drop. It signals that Ramayana: Rise of a Legend will be treated as a global-scale event rather than a single-language release. The Bengaluru moment did not reveal actual music, but it made the emotional case: this score already comes with personal history for its lead.

Source: The Times of India