In this exclusive interview: Mahesh Bhatt talks with Subhash K Jha about the incredible and esteemed Oscar winning composer M . M . Keeravani, his first meeting him, and praises their many beautiful notes for the movies.
Do you recall your first meeting with Keeravani?
He was dressed in black. He had the gait and the hush of a sage. I first saw him at the AVM Studio in Chennai. It was a music sitting for Criminal—a Telugu film starring Nagarjuna and Manisha Koirala, later made in Hindi. He didn’t shake my hand.
Why?
He was observing a Sabarimala fast, a sacred tradition where the body is stilled, and touch is withheld. There was something shy, almost boyish in his bearing. But the air around him carried stillness, like someone who had lived near fire and knew how not to flinch.
What happened next in your meeting with him?
He spoke to Nagarjuna and my producer in Telugu. For a while, I was a listener on the outside. Then, as if lowering a drawbridge, he turned to me and softly sang an old Hindi film song. He said he had heard it years ago on Binaca Geet Mala. That’s how he reached out. Not with words, but with music.
That’s Keeravani for you.
It stunned me—the depth of his voice, its honesty, its disarming lack of show. No artifice. No sales pitch. Just music that came from a place older than ambition.
Criminal didn’t work. But its music did?
Criminal didn’t work. The film collapsed. But the track—’Tum Mile Dil Khile’—survived. It soared. It still echoes today in places where love blooms. But what truly began that day wasn’t a song.
Then what was it?
It was a silence between us. A recognition. A quiet trust. We walked deeper into each other’s worlds with Zakhm, a film stitched from my own wounds. It was his music that gave voice to my silences. ‘Maa Ne Kahak is the only track, perhaps, that truly maps my inner landscape. It understands the part of me I’ve never dared to explain. Then came ‘Gali Mein Aaj Chand Nikla’. Every Eid, when the moon appears—and homes are lit with anticipation—that song returns. It has outlived us. It belongs to the people now.
Then came Jism?
We met again—this time for Jism – Pooja’s dark, intoxicating noir. He built the soundscape of that film like a man building a temple in the dark. Each note had breath. Each silence had seduction. He gave wings to that film.
Keeravani has come a long way since then?
But nothing moved me more than seeing that same shy man walk up to the Oscar stage, years later, for ‘Naatu Naatu’. This high-energy Telugu song, composed by him and sung by Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava had put this self-effacing man onto the world stage.
Do you see any change in him?
He hasn’t changed. Still soft-spoken. Still reluctant in the spotlight. But his music had travelled across the globe and returned home with the world’s applause. I watched him on the global platform, and I remembered the man in black at AVM Studios. No spectacle. Just silence and sound. He is the only composer who has not just scored my films, but scored me. Today, as he stands at the threshold of another year, I look back with gratitude and forward with awe. His recent work in Anupam Kher’s masterpiece Tanvi the Great proves that the fire has only deepened.
Happy Birthday, M.M. Kreem. Or as the world now knows him—Keeravani ji. You made my life sing.
