There were two memorable moments for Chandrika Tandon at the Grammys this year, where Triveni, the album she created with South African flautist Wouter Kellerman and Japanese-American cellist Eru Matsumoto, won in the category of best New Age, Ambient or Chant album. The first was seeing how the Awards focused on raising funds for the victims of the Los Angeles wildfire, which showed the community of musicians was prepared to come together for a greater cause. The second was hearing their name being called out as winners in their category. “It was a happy shock,” she told THE WEEK. “Walking to the podium through a cheering crowd was an incredible experience.”
Just as incredible was the aftermath of the awards, when the accolades started pouring in. “The reaction from friends has been like a dam bursting open,” she says. “As someone from India said, ‘a billion hearts are with you’. And that is exactly what I felt.” She says the support she got, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to people she has never met, was “overwhelmingly gracious and sweet”.
Her achievement is even more incredible when you consider that Tandon, 70, has not just distinguished herself in music, but also in business (she runs her own multimillion dollar company, Tandon Capital Advisors) and philanthropy, all the while being a wife, mother and grandmother. Like with most people, to unravel her success, one must rewind to her formative years. Tandon grew up in a middle-class family in Chennai which placed great emphasis on education and achievement. Her sister Indra Nooyi was CEO of PepsiCo and her brother Nandu Narayanan heads Trident Investment Management.
Still, education could not come at the cost of marriage and family. Growing up as the oldest girl child in a traditional Tamil Brahmin family, Tandon was made to understand that an arranged marriage was her destiny, with her mother collecting steel utensils from her birth for her trousseau. Refusing to kowtow to her family’s expectations, she went on a hunger strike to be allowed to go to the college of her choice. In 1973, she graduated in commerce from the Madras Christian College and then became one of only eight women in her batch to study business at IIM Ahmedabad. She went for her first job interview in New York in slippers and a borrowed coat. Since then, she has built her own firm at a time when there were few women executives. She has never let difficulties daunt her, even while working in places like war-torn Beirut.
“My mantra has been to live unbounded,” she says. “As a young girl in Chennai, the books and poetry I read inspired me to dream of faraway lands and enormous possibilities. Because of this, I have never seen boundaries. I paired that vision with passion, determination and hard work in everything that I did, whether in my education, work or music.”
Music as medicine : Chandrika Tandon with Wouter Kellerman and Eru Matsumoto, the co-creators of the Grammy-winning album Triveni.
She has achieved everything she has by focusing on the end and not the means. She was determined to go to business school, without minding too much its skewed gender ratio. The same applied to her career. Her focus was on the impact she would create, not the economics of it. “When we focus on the end, believe in it with passion, and work hard, we have limitless potential,” she says.
So how did music enter this mix? As a child, she says, she sang before she spoke. She sang to all the sounds in the universe―the hum of an air-conditioner, leaves ruffling in the breeze.... She sang at every opportunity and won many prizes. But music receded into the backdrop when she entered the business world. However, as the years went by, she realised stress and worry were eating into her happiness. Two and a half decades ago, she reassessed her life and decided to make music and spirituality central to it. “Music helped me find myself,” she says. “As I began to seek higher levels of perfection in my music, I had to go through a process of quieting my mind. This led to intense meditation practices, including 10-day retreats and working with noted teachers. The deeper I came to understand myself, the more viscerally I felt connected with all of the planet. I started feeling the need to leave my corner of the world better than when I arrived and focus on a purpose bigger than myself.”
Initially, she would try to balance work with her passion for music. On Saturdays she would leave home at 4am, drive two hours for a music lesson, then return just in time to wake up her daughter. This, of course, was not sustainable, which caused her to restructure her life to make music a priority. That shift began with creating ‘Soul Call’―a gift of chants for her 90-year-old father-in-law, which in turn led to six studio albums, performing in front of thousands and conducting choirs. Then, of course, came Triveni, a dream-like mix of ancient Vedic chants, New Age ambiance and global traditions. “Wouter, Eru and I are incredibly different in terms of our heritage and musical focus, but we were united in our belief in the healing power of music,” she says. “That was our launching point. I had to think hard about which mantras to include and how they could be integrated with keys, the flute and the cello.” She says that the journey was collaborative and occasionally contentious, as each of them loves their artistic freedom. Still, in the end, all that mattered was the music.
“Music is love,” she says. “It ignites the light within us, and even in our darkest days, music spreads joy and laughter.”
Music, for her, has also inspired service. She has taken a proactive role in ensuring higher education, especially for those in need. Through the Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation, she and her husband Ranjan have donated to countless educational causes, including giving $100 million to the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, of which she is chairman. Her foundation has also established faculty Chairs at Yale and Harvard Universities, and IIM Ahmedabad and Madras Christian College. “My service is focused on two pillars,” she says. “The first is economic and emotional empowerment. This is seen in all the work I do with the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Technology is taking over many disciplines, and it is important that the current and future generations are well-versed in it so they can be economically self-sufficient. The second pillar is elevating human happiness through music and education. Music is a large part of this, but so is meditation and community building. Both the pillars are essential for living a complete life and they have played a key role in mine. I experience their benefits on a daily basis, and it is my mission to share them as widely as I can.”