Not everybody gets a call from Salman Khan in the middle of the night, who then proceeds to sing 'O Saami O Saami' into the phone. But if you're Devi Sri Prasad, the musician of the moment, you get all that and more. "Salmanbhai always calls me himself when he wants a song. He is a real chilled out, cool person. If he likes you, it is for life," he says. The man who scored the songs and background music of Pushpa: The Rise is now very much in demand in the Mumbai film industry. From Nitesh Tiwari's Bawaal to Ajay Devgn's Drishyam 2, he is scoring the music for many movies. Karan Johar described 'Srivalli' as one of the best songs of all time, he says, and "Shankar Mahadevan asked me to jam with him," he adds. A classically trained mandolin player, he considers the late Mandolin Srinivas his guru, as he does Ilaiyaraaja. Add to that the influence of Michael Jackson thanks to a video on the singer's life that his late screenwriter-father G Satyamurthy gifted him, and the result is an eclectic mix of influences that has produced the soulful item number 'O Antava' as well as the rhythmic 'O Saami'. "Rashmika (Mandanna) jokes that she has developed a hip problem from the number of times she has been asked to mimic the dance move," he says. He attributes his wide range to growing up in Chennai, where he was exposed to the kacheris (the music sabhas) as well as film music. Pushpa has done for him what Roja did for AR Rahman nationally in 1992. And with Pushpa, he has shown Mumbai that he is more than the king of item songs, having done popular dance numbers like 'Dhinka Chika' (Ready, 2011) and 'Seeti Maar' (Radhe, 2021) before. DSP, as he is popularly known, likes to listen to the narration of the whole film before composing the songs and also likes to do the background music himself. He also makes it a point to include all the background singers in the credits, most unusually. And when he wants inspiration and calm, he goes to the room where his "anna" (Mandolin Srinivas) composed and sits there for hours. Whether it was M Balamuralikrishna or Bhimsen Joshi or John McLaughlin, he would be exposed to all, and "only I would carry my guru's mandolin," he says. It is so different from his rock star image of someone who enjoys making people dance.

Ayan Mukerji

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Devi Sri Prasad: Rock and Raga