It was celebration time in the family of music maestro AR Rahman recently as his daughter Khatija got engaged to Riyasdeen Shaik Mohamed. Interestingly, just like Rahman, his daughter Khatija is also a singer and musician and Riyasdeen, who is the young one's husband-to-be, is also in the music business.
Khatija recently shared a social media post about her engagement on December 29 and introduced her fiancé as an audio engineer. Khatija, who is credited as the singer of Rock A Bye Baby track from Kriti Sanon-starrer Mimi, described Riyasdeen as 'an aspiring entrepreneur and a wizkid audio engineer'.
Audio or Sound Engineer sets up and does live music mixing for music concerts using the sound consoles. As per Riyasdeen's Instagram page, he has also collaborated with his father-in-law AR Rahman for his shows and the music maverick Amit Trivedi. A picture shared on his page shows AR Rahman performing live at the Khalifa Stadium in Doha in 2019. They collaborated on the live concert and shows dating back to 2017. They also worked together on Rahman's film Mersal which was released in 2017 and stars Vijay, Samantha and Kajal Aggarwal in lead roles. Mersal is directed by Atlee and became a huge hit at the time of release.
His other collaborations are with singers Benny Dayal and Haricharan Seshadri among others.
Meanwhile, Khatija made her singing debut in films with her father’s composition O Maramanishi/Puthiya Manidha in Robot (Enthiran) alongside the legendary SP Balasubramanyam. The movie is directed by visionary S Shankar and stars Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rai. Khatija was reportedly only 14 when she sang the song, as per ETimes.
Rahman's latest soundtrack is in the film Atrangi Re for director Aanand L Rai. He also gave music to four-part docu series House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths for Netflix.
