MUMBAI: Time Magazine's latest list of the Top 100 Most Influential People includes two names from the music world, both of whom have been associated with Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire.

Speaking for M.I.A., movie and music video director Spike Jonze says, "The great thing about her is that she doesn't have some global plan."   "She just has things she cares about and is interested in, from all over the world."

Spike Jonze goes on to talk about the time he first met M.I.A. and the profound, albeit unintentional, impact she left on him and how that same impact is being left on the world.

"Last summer she was performing in Philadelphia, and she showed up at the venue, and it was an armory building. She felt kind of weird about it and decided she wasn't going to perform there unless she acknowledged that, so she found a group of Army veterans against the Iraq war and had them come and speak as her opening act. That's her mission - it's personal and evolving, focused but totally spontaneous. She's always for the underdog. And no matter how many times she's on the Grammys, she'll always see herself as the underdog," Spike Jonze said.

Model Padma Lakshmi has written a piece on Rahman. "In India... where film and pop music are one, A R Rahman, 43, dominates the music industry so totally that he has supplied the sound track for a whole generation. He enjoys the godlike devotion of India's youth, but everyone from the street child who sweeps train platforms to the middle-aged doctor in Mumbai's posh Malabar Hill hums his tunes," Padma Lakshmi writes.