At the Reliance music studio in Mumbai, Oscar winner AR Rahman was playing the piano. A group of six girls were singing along. They had come for the audition for Rahman’s show in the Coke Studio Season 3 programme. Suddenly, Rahman stopped playing and asked, “Which one of you is Shashaa?” There was a pin-drop silence. “It was a heart attack moment for me. I thought he would not select me. I raised my hand,” says Shashaa Tirupati. Rahman looked at her and then looked away.
Later, during a break, Shashaa asked Rahman whether she had performed badly. He said, “Oh no. Actually, one of my assistants played me your work and I feel your voice sounds like a musical instrument.”
At that point, Shashaa did not know whether it was a compliment. But a month after the shoot, Shashaa got a call from Rahman’s studio in Chennai. “He wanted me to sing for one of his songs,” says Shashaa, who has been working with Rahman since 2013, and had come to Kochi as part of Rahman’s troupe for a concert in June.
There is an easy smile on her face when she says this. Of course, Shashaa has plenty to smile about. Recently, she won the National Film Award for best female playback singer for Tamil song ‘Vaan Varuvaan’, which was composed by Rahman. And she remembers clearly what Rahman had told her when she received the award. “He said, ‘Don’t let these awards and accomplishments be the governing factor in what you do’,” says Shashaa, who has also sung ‘Humma’ song from Hindi film OK Jaanu. This was one of the highest ranking songs on YouTube and was viewed more than 200 million times.
Apart from several singing songs in Tamil for Rahman, Shashaa is also adept at singing in Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Konkani, Bengali, and English. Some of the songs have done well. This is a career, which Shashaa, an MBA from Symbiosis International University in Pune, could not have envisaged when she was growing up in Vancouver as the child of Indian immigrants. Her parents loved Hindi music, so Shashaa grew up listening to songs from the 1950s to the 70s.
One day when she was five years old, she sang Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Jao Re’. “My mum was like, ‘What!” says Shashaa. “She ran and called my father. My dad was also shocked. And it was the time when they decided that I should get proper training.”
So, from the time Shashaa was eight, she was taken to India during vacations, where she studied classical Hindustani music. However, there were several years of struggle before she got the breakthrough with Rahman.