From Sandip Roy:

“Ravi Shankar was our Columbus. While one explorer came looking for India, the other took India to the world. Perhaps that’s why it’s only fitting that the first time I saw him perform was not in India, but at the Kremlin in Moscow.

“I was no classical music connoisseur, just a callow student, part of an Indian youth delegation and he was performing with a Russian folk ensemble and the Moscow chamber orchestra. I remember the draughty, rather dreary hotel dining room, the cold windy Red Square and the rickety Aeroflot airplanes. But most of all I remember the Kremlin vibrating with Ravi Shankar’s Shanti Mantra…