Rahul Nair makes his Hindi film debut on October 23 with Main Na Raha Mera, a release built around an unusual commitment: he has composed all 16 songs of the score himself. The soundtrack carries vocals by Arijit Singh, Sonu Nigam, Sunidhi Chauhan, Rekha Bhardwaj, Benny Dayal and Stebin Ben, making the film a single-composer showcase at a moment when Hindi film music is often assembled across many hands.
The 31-year-old composer, producer and recording artist from Kerala traces the entry point to 2009, when a football injury put him on complete bed rest. A defender’s studs struck his shin in a match; Nair says he was not wearing shin guards. “I wasn’t wearing shin guards, my mistake,” he told Local Samosa. Confined to his room, he spent hours at a piano he had learned but never taken seriously.
From a football injury to a 16-song score
Nair describes that period as “surprisingly beautiful”. Without football, he explored the instrument without the pressure of an outcome. “Sometimes, an unexpected pause in life introduces you to your real calling,” he says. That curiosity became a career; he now works across contemporary Indian, cinematic, pop, soul and alternative sounds, and names A.R. Rahman, Amit Trivedi and John Bonham among his influences.
His stated rule is “Emotion before genre”. For cinema, he says, the work is not isolated: “you’re serving a story, its characters and their emotions.” The challenge of a debut, he adds, is to make something that belongs to the film while keeping his own musical identity.
What he says has changed in film music
Nair agrees with a familiar complaint: that Hindi film music has lost some of its soul. He points to the layers a song passes through.
- A song can be technically perfect and commercially packaged, yet still lose what made it special.
- Teams increasingly ask “Will this work on Instagram Reels?” before asking “What are we trying to make people feel?”
- Numbers are often discussed before genre, composition or the emotion a track leaves behind.
- The responsibility, he argues, sits with both makers and listeners.
“A hook may get someone to stop scrolling, but only an emotion can make them return to a song,” Nair says. He wants an environment where originality is encouraged rather than negotiated away, and where composers can take creative risks.
Why the debut matters now
A Bollywood debut no longer carries the automatic weight it once did, as independent artists have multiplied and audiences have become more critical of film music. Nair’s 16-song score is a direct test of whether one composer can still shape a film’s emotional register at that scale. For him, the way forward is not to reject the past: “Hindi music has an extraordinary legacy, and the way forward isn’t necessarily to reject the past, but to find fresh ways of expressing ourselves.”
His measure for success is older than the algorithm: music that does not merely trend for a week but stays with people for years.
Source: Local Samosa
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