🇮🇳 Anirudh Ravichander

He was born in Chennai to the actor Ravi Raghavendra and the choreographer Lakshmi, and grew up inside the Tamil-cinema ecosystem — his mother is the sister of Rajinikanth's wife Latha, which makes Anirudh the actor's nephew by marriage. He took piano grades from Trinity College London while still at Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan, and a B.Com from Loyola College that he has admitted in interviews he attended mainly for the access to the music room.

He started as a session pianist and arranger for established Tamil music directors. Dhanush, an in-law and an admirer, asked him to score the songs of 3 in 2011. The score itself was conventional Tamil-cinema melody; the marketing single 'Why This Kolaveri Di' was the accident-that-was-not — Dhanush's lyric, Anirudh's loop, the actor Shruti Haasan in the background vocal, all of it cut in a single sitting.

What followed was a deliberate pivot. The 2013 score for Ethir Neechal, the 2014 score for Velaiilla Pattadhari with Dhanush, the rebranding of Tamil-cinema BGM around electronic textures and live percussion. By 2017 he had Vikram Vedha, in 2019 the Petta soundtrack for his uncle Rajinikanth, and a permanent seat at Sun Pictures' biggest-budget productions.

The Hindi crossover came with Atrangi Re for Aanand L Rai in 2021 and was confirmed by Jawan in 2023 — the Atlee-directed Shah Rukh Khan vehicle whose score sat at the top of Indian streaming charts for the better part of a year. 'Zinda Banda' and 'Chaleya' are by now generic Indian-wedding fare. The Telugu blockbuster Jailer in the same year, again with Rajinikanth, gave him a Tamil-Telugu double at the top of the All-India box office.

He launched a global concert run — the first Tamil-cinema composer to tour at scale — with sold-out venues in London, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and the SAP Centre in San Jose. The 2024 tour included a full orchestra and an opening act of unreleased material — Anirudh, characteristically, hummed his choruses to a sixty-piece string section that read the parts off iPads.

He is musical director on the 2025 Rajinikanth–Lokesh Kanagaraj production Coolie, and is widely reported to be working on the Atlee-directed Allu Arjun film that goes into production through 2025. He has refused the dozens of marriage proposals the Tamil tabloids have placed in front of him and lives in a Poes Garden apartment a kilometre from Rajinikanth's house.

He plays a left-handed Gibson and writes melodies on a small Casio keyboard he has owned since he was twelve. The signature, on every score, is a four-bar piano motif buried somewhere in the third reel — a tribute, he has said, to Maestro Ilaiyaraaja, the composer he calls 'the only Tamil musician whose shoes are still too big for any of us.'