NEW DELHI, INDIA, JANUARY 16, 2002: “I was destined to do this. I grew sick of Sanskrit in school, but it’s caught me again,” says 74-year-old composer Vanraj Bhatia, of his newest double album Ananta. He was trained in Indian classical ragas as a child and later studied composition in Western classical music with Nadia Boulanger. The text begins with the prayer “Asatoma Sad Gamaya” (“From darkness, lead me to light”), proceeds to the creation of the sacred syllable Om, and follows with a quantity of prayers and blessings. The second disc/audio cassette tells the evolutionary story of three ideas: Anant (the endless flow of creation), Atman (the eternal soul) and Anand (the joy of living). Bhatia was the first in India, in the late 1980’s, to set Vedic chants in Western style harmony.
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