Sports and music go hand in hand. In 2013, after India lifted the World Cup, M.S.
Dhoni, one of the main architects of the triumphant team in the finals, went on record to talk about the most emotional moment in the finals. And that wasn’t the exciting cricket or the steep run chase, but a song. “The stadium started to sing ‘Vande Mataram’.
That atmosphere, I feel, is very difficult to recreate,” recalled Dhoni. In the recently-concluded Olympics 2024 held in Paris , there was yet another marriage of song and sports, when the U.S.
artistic swimming team took to the waters. The talented eight-member team performed to ‘Taal Se Taal Mila’ from the 1999 superhit Bollywood film Taal , directed by Subhash Ghai, featuring Aishwarya Rai, Anil Kapoor and Akshaye Khanna in the lead. Taal had music by A.
R. Rahman, then fast rising in popularity in Bollywood after several superhit albums in Tamil cinema. Beyond the melody in the songs, Taal also featured a percussion-led track titled ‘Beat of Passion’, a portion of which was used by the swimmers in their Olympics outing.
‘Beat of Passion’ starts almost like a whisper. A few finger-snapping sounds later, the drums come into play, albeit slowly, almost like it’s a trailer for the main course that is to come. When the drums kick in, your feet start moving, and by the time the ‘Beat of Passion’ ends, you’re in a frenzy.
The ‘Beat of Passion’ is percussion mastery by ‘Drums’ Sivamani, with whom A.R. Rahma.