A.R. Rahman's authorized biography arrived in 2011 at the height of his international profile — two years after his twin Academy Awards for Slumdog Millionaire, at the moment when the global music establishment had fully absorbed the fact that the most interesting film composer working in any language was operating from Chennai.

The "Mozart of Madras" nickname, which Rahman had long found both flattering and slightly absurd, captured something real about his position in Indian musical culture: the sense of an unprecedented talent that had arrived fully formed, transformed Bollywood and Tamil film music simultaneously, and then demonstrated that the transformation had global resonance.

The biography offered what authorized accounts of living subjects always offer and sometimes deliver: access to the subject's own account of their formative experiences, the texture of their work process, and the internal narrative they carry about their own life. For Rahman, whose public persona was famously private and spiritually oriented — his conversion to Sufi Islam as a young man after a period of family tragedy was central to his understanding of his own artistry — the authorized format allowed him some control over how those elements were presented.

The production process described in various interviews around the biography's release was characteristically unusual: the studio behind his house in Chennai where he worked through the night, the prayer that preceded each session, the almost synaesthetic relationship with sound that made his compositions feel architecturally different from conventional film scoring.

Whether the biography fully captured what made Rahman extraordinary was debatable. His actual extraordinary-ness was in his music, which no written account of any life fully conveys.