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[edit] Grammy nomination

2011: the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards.

She was nominated in the Best Contemporary World Music Album category, for her Om Namo Narayanaya: Soul Call, a collection of Sanskrit chants. She handled the vocals and vocal arrangements in the album, on the other hand Tejendra Narayan Majumdar and Snehasish Majumdar did the orchestral arrangements.

[edit] Grammy awarded

2025: Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album for Triveni

[edit] Biography

Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon is a Sanskrit chant vocalist. Tandon is a Chennai native who now doubles as a New York-based businesswoman.

[edit] A brief biography

[edit] As of 2025

February 8, 2025: The Times of India

As we speak, Chandrika Tandon goes back in time to her middle-class Chennai home with its red oxide floor. She’s still a school kid, Chandrika Krishnamurthy then. A whole future lies ahead of her; she has her dreams, but her mother has her plans. They are middle class, and her mother has two daughters to marry off. Chandrika and her younger sister Indra (Nooyi, the former PepsiCo CEO). She has been trading her old Kanjeevarams for stainless steel utensils, which will be her gift when Chandrika marries at age 18. Right now, the gifts lie locked in a Godrej almirah, a few spoons, plates, bowls.


“Her entire focus was that I don’t run away with somebody, that I somehow uphold the honour of the family and get married so that her job is done. That was her perspective. She would tell every classmate of mine who came home that at 17 I’ll be engaged, at 18 I’ll be married,” says Chandrika over a video call from Manhattan. 


The past month has been hectic. She was in India, formally inaugurating the Boyd Tandon School of Business at Madras Christian College. Then back to the US, and off to LA for the Grammys, where she was a proud winner at age 70, her first, though she has been nominated before. She’s just got back home in NYC, and the mails are pouring in. People are fascinated by her chants. They want to know the meanings.


She will get back to them, but later. Now, she is telling us her story. And she is back in Chennai, circa 1970. “At that time, we had a lot of power cuts. There was no radio. You know how we would entertain ourselves during power cuts? We would sing… We grew up in the simplest of households. We didn’t have a domestic help. Every night, one of my jobs was to clean the floor with water and a broom. I can recall all the songs I was singing when I was cleaning the floors. So, every experience in my life was punctuated by music,” she says. 
No one back then could have predicted that this girl sweeping the kitchen floor would one day be a partner in McKinsey, set up her own consultancy firm that would restructure companies across the globe, and then cap it all with a Grammy for a chanting album, Triveni, part of a troika with South African composer and flautist Wouter Kellerman and Japanese cellist Eru Matsumoto.


These things don’t happen in real life. There are far too many hurdles. But Chandrika knew how to stretch boundaries, cross hurdles.


She got through to Madras Christian College, but her mother was dead against it. It would scupper the marriage-at-18 plan. Sister Mary Nessen from the college met her mother. Sister Nessen, says Chandrika, told her mother, “Mrs Krishnamurthy, I give you my guarantee. This is a nun in a white habit speaking.”


The guarantee worked. Chandrika didn’t run away. She studied. And she sang. By now, she had also started singing French songs. College finally ended, and the question was, what next? She was thinking law. Professor Swaminathan, her teacher, suggested IIM-Ahmedabad.


Singing At IIM-A Interview


Around the same time, says Chandrika, a globe- trotting “fancy uncle” showed up at a family event. “He asked what I was going to do after college. I said my professor told me to apply to IIM-Ahmedabad. ‘Forget it,’ uncle said. ‘That’s like getting a Nobel Prize. Don’t waste your time’.”


That stung. “Fancy uncle” had to be proved wrong. She applied, cleared the entrance exams, and was called for her interview. In her application, among her different achievements she had listed ‘French songs’. “I’m the last person to be interviewed that day. There are three professors. They grill me on contract law and all of this for close to an hour. And then this professor who’s spent many years at the Sorbonne in Paris, says, ‘okay, this is the end of a very long day for us, why don’t you sing us a song in French?’ And I sang a song in French, a very, very profound song. I sang that and I think that’s why I got into IIM-Ahmedabad. Music’s played a part in my life in every which way, consciously and unconsciously,” she says.


16 McKinsey Interviews In Silk Saris


After Ahmedabad, she joined CitiCorp, which sent her for training to Beirut in 1975, then in the middle of a civil war (a cinema where she had gone to watch ‘Lust for Life’ but found the show cancelled, blew up minutes after she walked away). Eventually, Citi sent her to New York. She was still very much a Tamil woman who had never worn anything but saris and chappals.


Then came the time for a switch to McKinsey. She chose three printed silk saris to wear for the 16 interviews over three days. And open-toe shoes. There was a blizzard blowing outside. “Not one partner, not one interviewer ever asked me, ‘Are you planning to change your clothes’? They just accepted me. That was amazing. For the first few years, I didn’t know anything about western clothes,” Chandrika tells us.


From Accidental To Intentional Living 


A lot has happened since then. After the McKinsey stint, she set up her own consultancy. She brought up a daughter, learnt music, perfected her pronunciation of mantras, donated $100 million to New York University, became a grandmother, sang to her grandchildren, cut albums, got nominated for a Grammy, and eventually won it. Sitting in that Chennai home, back in 1970, no one could have foreseen this.


Chandrika says she is content now. “I have gone from accidental living to intentional living. Every moment, including this conversation I’m having now, is an intentional choice. In my 40s, I was a type A, busy, working 24x7. And I was stressed out all the time. I was trying to be the best mother and I felt I wasn’t there enough. And I was trying to be the best wife. I was trying to be the best family person, meet all the Indian values. I had a very big job. My worst schedule was when I would fly to Australia every 10 days for 32 hours from New York. It was how insanely I treated myself.”


She’s still busy, but it’s nothing like before. We loop back to the present and ask her some questions on her music. 


Taking Chants To Everyone


“There’s this Chinese saying — before enlightenment you chop wood and after enlightenment you chop wood. I know exactly what I’m going to do with or without the Grammy. My day-to-day life doesn’t change. What does change, to some degree, is that we will just have more attention for mantras, for chanting. The idea is to make chants or mantras accessible. It shouldn’t just be the purview of pundits. Ordinary people should be able to access it and feel happy.


“Just this morning, I had about 20-odd mails — not from Indians but people all over the world. Some wanted to know about the Mahamrityunjaya chant in Pathway To Light (the first number in Triveni). ‘There’s something this mantra does to me — what does it mean?’ someone asked. It’s a mantra for immortality. It’s a mantra that’s used when people are ill because it tells you, let’s transcend whatever travails you’re having at this moment and let us understand that our spirit lives on. 


“It makes me feel very proud to be able to explain this because this has been my life. Those are the mantras that have transformed my life,” Chandrika says.


Never Lost Touch With Music 


“I never lost touch with music. I cannot, because music is part of me. I did different kinds of music. Growing up in Chennai, I had some traditional classical Carnatic music lessons and I was listening to mantras and chants and, of course, Western as well. During my career — in Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia — I didn’t stay as much in touch with Indian music. It’s really hard to — you have a full-time job, you’re working pretty much 24x7.
 “But I was soaking in other kinds of music. I remember vividly sitting in a Brazilian piano bar after dinner. I don’t drink, but I was there. I would go sit there and listen to these amazing Brazilian singers like Caetano Veloso and (Antonio) Carlos Jobim. In the two years that I lived in Brazil, I learnt Portuguese through Brazilian music.


“If a great artiste was coming to town, like The Seekers, I would buy the most expensive tickets in the first row and if they were performing for two nights or three nights, I would buy tickets for all days. So, this is how I kept in touch with music. I was never away from music. I did classical, I did jazz. I got introduced to Stan Getz and Charlie Bird. In fact, when I was nominated for the Grammy the first time, you know who else was nominated? My hero, Sergio Mendes. I was more excited by the fact that Sergio Mendes was on the ballot with me than I was about the fact that I was nominated for it.” 


The Moment That Changed It All


“In 1999, I had a crisis of spirit. I was at the height of my professional career. I had a very, very big deal which would have vaulted my company to the next level. I’d almost agreed to do the deal in Europe. On the way back, on the plane, I realised I couldn’t. I just cried. And I’m not a crying sort. Something happened.

So, I kind of decided that I had to re-examine myself, get involved with things that gave me happiness. That I wanted to do things in a much more intentional way. So, that was the beginning of my journey of reconnecting in a very active way with learning music,” Chandrika says.


“Then, when I went to the masters to learn, what attracted me was not really the taals and the vilambit. I wanted to learn enough ragas so that I could sing well. I just wanted to learn bhajans. I learnt enough of the basics. All I wanted to do was reach a higher power through the words. And Sanskrit is what I wanted to use to express myself.”


The Making Of Triveni


“Triveni happened because I was meant to do it,” says Chandrika. “Wouter came to me and said, ‘Hey, please would you work with us on this album?’ I said okay. All three of us have been independently pursuing music for wellness or for healing in some way. All of us have been thinking about what the broader purpose of music is.


“When I said okay to Triveni, all three of us had completely different ideas. So we started to think. Wouter had ideas about the lines he wanted to play and Eru had ideas of how she would support it. But then, I decided I wanted to bring in mantras. We got together in New York for about a few days and we battled it out. We sat together, we fought, we had fun, we created. We would finish late at night and start early in the morning. And we just did music. And then it came. The skeletons of Triveni emerged. We went back to our respective places. I’m in New York, Eru’s in LA and Wouter’s in Johannesburg. We all worked remotely. Our mixing engineer was in LA. Our producers were in Amsterdam and South Africa. So, this is a global team. That is the wonder of technology.”

[edit] WALL STREET TO WORLD STAGE

CitiCorp (1975-1978)


● Worked in Beirut during Lebanese Civil War. Operations Manager and Financial Controller, South Asia


McKinsey & Company (1979-1990)


● Global financial institutions practice. First Indian-American woman elected Partner


Tandon Capital Associates (1992-present) 


● Transformed firms into top-performing institutions, adding over a billion dollars in market cap


● Clients included Chase Manhattan, Unibanco, Bank of Boston, Republic New York Corp, SunCorp – Metway (Australia)


 Tandon Family Office and Foundation Vice Chairman (2015-Present) b b


● Overseeing financial investments to drive economic and emotional empowerment through music and education


==KEY PHILANTHROPY==
 ● $100m gift to NYU


● $2m gift to Madras Christian College


● Endowed chairs at Harvard Business School and Yale University


● Grants to IIM-Ahmedabad, Berklee College of Music & Scindia School, Gwalior

[edit] CHANDRIKA KRISHNAMURTHY TANDON

● Grammy Award 2024: Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album Triveni (with Wouter Kellerman and Eru Matsumoto, in pic)


● Grammy nomination 2010: Contemporary World Music Album Soul Call (Om Namo Narayanaya chants)


● Two more albums in production, with several released in the past