Allah Rakha Rahman ( Born on January 6, 1967 as A.S. Dileep Kumar in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) is a two time Academy Award winning Indian film music composer, based out of Chennai, Tamilnadu. he made his debut with the Malayalam movie Yoda, while he was noticed by a wider audience when he made his debut in Tamil through Mani Ratnam's Tamil movie, Roja (Rose), in 1992, which was subsequently dubbed into many languages. Ram Gopal Verma's Rangeela was the first Hindi movie to have Rahman as the music director. He is a recipient of the Padma Shri. To date he has sold over 250 million albums worldwide making him one of the biggest selling artists of the last two decades.

He became a National icon and highly respected artist with the launch of "Vande Mataram". His magical music and Bharat Bala's cinimatography made the Vande Mataram video a source of pride, inspiration and patriotic fervour and probably the only patriotic song to stay on the mainstream top 10 charts for years.

His more unknown works include the AIRTEL jingle and lately the WORLDSPACE jingle.

Rang De Basanti (2006), Bombay, Dil Se and Roja are amongst his more popular works. He was also the music composer for the movies Lagaan (which was nominated for the Oscars for the Best Foreign Movie) and Yuva.

Three of the maestro's songs have been added to the 56 song Oscar list. Khalabali and Lukha Chuppi from movie Rang de Basanti and Chan-Chan from the movie Water are included in the Oscar short list of songs.

A.R Rahman in the West:

He obtained a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London and he graduated with a degree in Western classical music.

His recent works Include "Bombay Dreams" with Andrew Lloyd Weber, a Mandarin movie, "Between Heaven and Earth" and the 8 time oscar award winning movie, "Slumdog Millionaire".

The movie "Inside Man" opens with the Hindi song "Chaiya Chaiya" composed by A.R.Rahman for the film "Dil Se".

The music of A.R. Rahman also featured in the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack, which was released at the end of 2008. He not only won a Golden Globe award for the soundtrack but he won the Oscar for the Best Score and Best Song category for the song 'Jai Ho' featured in the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" which makes him the first Indian ever to have won The Academy Award.

Simply he is great.

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