| HE was born in Tamil Nadu, bred in Zambia, educated in the UK and the US and is now creating rap tunes in India. Meet BlaaZe, the 31-year-old global music rapper who is blazing the trail of new sounds coming out of the subcontinent. He is the co-founder of up-and-coming band The Zambezi Funk. (See report on facing page.) AMITABH'S TEACHER This singer-rap star has even taught Amitabh Bachchan - Bollywood's biggest star - how to rap. Or at least, how to lip-synch to a rap track he wrote for last year's film Bunty aur Bubli (Bunty and Bubli) which starred the Bollywood idol. BlaaZe's real name is - take a deep breath now - Lakshmi Narasimhan Vijaya Rajagopal Sheshadri Sharma Rajesh Raman. He was in town recently to perform at the Singapore Arts Festival as part of the POPagenda show. The Chennai-based singer told The New Paper that it was an amazing experience teaching the 63-year-old Amitabh how to rap. 'The thing is Amitabh has done everything except rap. This was not like a feather in his cap. This was... a whole new cap he was wearing,' said BlaaZe. Apparently it was director Shaad Ali's idea for the Bollywood veteran to rap for the music video. 'Shaad said if Amitabh did it, nobody would expect it,' recalled BlaaZe. But the first day of the shoot didn't go well as Amitabh walked on the set boiling with anger. BlaaZe later found that it wasn't a celebrity hissy fit. The Bollywood veteran was petrified about doing something completely new. 'He very honestly told me, 'For the first time, I was here thinking why do I have to go through this. If it doesn't work it's going to look ridiculous',' he said. BlaaZe had put together a couple of pages of his thoughts on rap and the history of the genre to help Amitabh get into it. 'He understood - being the son of a poet - that it was poetry. It broke the ice. The vibe was smooth after that,' said BlaaZe proudly. Amitabh was even bestowed with a rap moniker - Uncle B. STARTED AT 19
For BlaaZe, it was another notch in a burgeoning career, which started when he was 19. He wrote and rapped a poem for Zambia's then-President Frederick Chiluba in 1991 on national radio. But his musical ambitions were temporarily suspended after a bad run-in with a Mumbai music director in 1997, who allegedly took credit for his rap song that was featured in a Bollywood film. BlaaZe got his arts degree in cinema from Columbia University and came back to Mumbai to work as an MTV producer. In 2001, he met musical maestro A R Rahman and has been working with him since. He wrote a rap number, Dating, for the Tamil film Boys in 2002, which was a big hit. BlaaZe is a part of the growing trend in India, which is fusing Western and Indian styles of music-making. Last year, he collaborated with Chinese pop sensation Coco Lee in an Indian remix of a song called No Doubt from her English album, Exposed. We rap about what's real BlaaZe wants to use his 'Rhythm And Poetry', or rap, to raise social awareness. Together with composer-friend Sagar Desai, he has started a band called The Zambezi Funk. Its first single, called In My Father's Name, was inspired by the arrest of a high-profile Hindu religious leader accused of murdering a temple official. Soon the band will be releasing a new single called Ban The Crooked Police, which will obviously not go down well with India's police force. Said BlaaZe: 'We cannot rap about drugs, guns and the cars with switches and hydraulics (like in the US). We don't have that. It's fake. 'We have to rap about what we have in our society.' | 
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon
