In an exclusive conversation, the untalented music director bravely tries to stave off charges of plagiarism and insists that he fully deserves all the success he has enjoyed in his brief stint at music composing.
Almost every song that you have composed has been proved to have been a blatant copy of Turkish, Indonesian or Middle-Eastern tracks. One very popular website tracking plagiarism in bollywood has listed nearly 50 tracks that you have shamelessly copied from various bands worldwide. You have now replaced Anu Malik as Bollywood's # 1 copy-cat.
I've never denied that I lift foreign tunes for my movies. Yes, I've used Turkish and Indonesian tunes and will continue to use them in future too.
You don't sound very apologetic..
Why should I? Please don't use words like 'shamelessly' for the hard work I do to entertain the masses. I don't...
Hard work?
I don't consider using foreign tunes for my movies as copying. I'm actually doing a great service to the nation by exposing millions of Indians to world music, a kind of music they would have been never exposed to in the normal course of their lives. But due to the hard work I do spending countless hours listening to bands around the world, weeding out the average, poor, bad and terrible songs and selecting the best ones, music lovers in India get to enjoy some of the best music being composed all over the world.
Isn't composing original tunes harder than merely copying them?
Not really. Composing original music requires natural genius, not much of hard work. Some of the best tunes ever have been composed in less than five minutes. But copying music entails hours and hours of listening to boring and tedious music in the hope of discovering a single gem. And when you hit upon a great track, it takes some amount of musical talent to realize immediately that you are listening to a winner track, which is really very difficult when you are listening to tracks in languages that you don't understand.
What about things like copyright? Don't the original composers deserve royalty from all the money you and your producers make?
Do you purchase every song of mine that you enjoy? Crores of people enjoy my music, but only a few thousand of them buy cassettes and CD's of my albums, while the rest download them illegally or listen for free on tv or radio.
Is it fair that original composers like Ismail Darbaar or Adesh Srivastava who refuse to plagiarise, should be out of work while a copycat like you should be raking in the moolah?
Who said life is fair? If you observe how real life works, you will notice that people who are original, people who invent new stuff and people who make new discoveries never make as much money as those who distribute their original inventions. Most of the inventors of the gadgets we use are anonymous, often poorly-paid scientists working quietly in their labs, while the big multinational corporations who manufacture, market and distribute their inventions are the ones making billions off their inventions
I'm rich and successful because I provide value-addition to my film producers and record companies by guarantying them superhit music. I import good-quality, high-standard music from Turkey, Indonesia and many other counties, process it in my studios, remake and distribute it to a large, music-hungry market like India.
Importing, distributing..you sound so business-like. Isn't it more like bootlegging? Aren't you afraid that the law will one day catch up with you? Doesn't the prospect of being sued by the original composers of your songs worry you?
You don't quite understand how it works. I only copy music whose copyright is held not by the artists, but by their music companies. My producers ensure that they sign up the same record company which holds the copyright for the music I copy. A record company like Sony when it signs up a Turkish or an Indonesian band would usually be able to sell their albums only in their home countries. But using my services, they are able to expand the market of such bands to a huge market like India and also an equally big NRI market.
Aah..So you work undercover for Sony Records too?
Yes, Sonny
