‘Ram Gopal Varma was sleeping on the stairs, Subhash Ghai was passed out on a swing': Lyricist Sameer recalls 3 am session with AR Rahman in a jungle

Indian Express

09-07-2025

Stories of iconic music composer AR Rahman's unique working style are not new. Rahman is known for working at night and has made filmmakers, composers, and lyricists wait for hours during late-night sittings. Recently, lyricist Sameer Anjaan shared his experience of working with Rahman on the 2002 film The Legend of Bhagat Singh. During an interaction, Sameer spoke about how he, director Rajkumar Santoshi, and producer Ramesh Taurani were called into a forest at 3 am by AR Rahman to listen to the tunes he had composed for the film.
Narrating his experience of working with Rahman on the YouTube channel The Ashoke Pandit Show, Sameer shared, that the session was initially planned for 11 pm, but kept getting postponed. Ultimately, at 3 am, he was called along with the film's producer and director. 'When we reached his house, we saw that Ram Gopal Varma had fallen fast asleep on the stairs, Subhash Ghai was passed out on the swing in the lawn. Asha Bhosle was singing inside and Udit Narayan was just talking nonsense upstairs but in all of this, Rahman was not there,' he recalled.
Since Rahman wasn't at his home, his assistant asked the three artistes to travel to another location to meet the composer — a location that turned out to be in the middle of a jungle. Sameer recalled with a laugh, 'We were asked to drive to another location and follow a car. We stopped on the side of a highway and a man, holding a lantern, asked us to follow him. It felt like we were going for a horror film's session. The man walked before us holding a lantern, and we were driving behind him. It was a dense jungle.'
After this bizarre experience, Sameer finally met Rahman. He said, 'When we reached the destination, Rahman was sitting inside a cottage on his keyboard and wearing headphones.' The lyricist recalled that it was in that hut where Rahman made them listen to the tunes he had prepared for the film. After this experience, Sameer vowed never to attend a session with Rahman in the middle of the night.