ANOUSHKA SHANKAR

STANDING AT THE CUSP OF THE PERSONAL AND THE UNIVERSAL, HER LATEST ALBUM, LOVE LETTERS, IS A MEDITATION ON HEARTBREAK. A PROUD BEARER OF HER FATHER PANDIT RAVI SHANKAR’S LEGACY ON CLASSICAL SITAR, ANOUSHKA SCALES NEW TERRITORY ON THIS ALBUM, WHERE SHE CONFESSES, MUCH HEALING HAPPENED WITH AN ENSEMBLE OF TALENTED GIRLFRIEND-SINGERS AND SONGWRITERS. SHE ALSO PREPARES TO TOUR THE WORLD IN CONCERTS DEDICATED TO HER LATE FATHER’S CENTENNIAL YEAR

- SANGEETA WADHWANI

You seem to be one of those lucky kids who had a mentor right at home, and possibly far less angst when choosing your path… would you agree?

“Well I had guidance, but I would not say I had total clarity. There are external assumptions that I was just born with some bow and arrow level of precise insights into what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and that was not the case! I obviously had this incredible opportunity and education, and also a career that started to develop because I started performing with my father, so young. But it happened before I even knew it was a career I wanted… I was still a teenager, deciding and unsure and nervous and all of those things.”

What kind of discipline did your father instill in you, were you doing riyaaz at the crack of dawn or rehearsing when other kids were out playing and having fun?

“Well not so bad, yes, but we did rehearse every day for at least a couple of hours. So like on school days it was like two hours a day, weekends three or four hours a day, but we would practice daily. He didn’t wake me up at 4.00 am or try to enforce practice the way it was done 100 years ago; no crack of dawn stuff. But there was definitely the element of not getting to do the things my friends were doing, because I was home, practicing.”

So the first album you worked on was Chants of India, where one reads that sooner rather than later, you were actually conducting the musicians – many of whom were your father’s contemporaries! Was that not tough on their egos?