UNITED STATES,, February 17, 2025 (RNS): The winner of the 2025 Grammy Award for best new age, ambient or chant album — a category once dominated by Enya — was an album titled Triveni, meaning “the confluence of three rivers” in Sanskrit, an apt description for its weaving of Vedic chants, melodic flute and cello by India’s Chandrika Tandon, South Africa’s Wouter Kellerman and Japan’s Eru Matsumoto. The name, which is given to the meeting point of the holy Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati rivers, said singer Tandon, came to her in one of her daily meditations. “It was a beautiful coincidence that our album called Triveni won the Grammy on Vasant Panchami when the Maha Prayag was going on,” Tandon told RNS, referring to the ongoing Maha Kumbh Mela festival held where the three rivers meet in Prayagraj, India, considered one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in the nation. The world’s largest gathering of humanity, with 400 million people attending this year, the Kumbh Mela happens every 12 years, with this year’s celebration, the Maha Kumbh Mela, happening only every 144 years, when the sun, the moon and Jupiter align.

Tandon was a prominent business mogul for more than half her life, the namesake of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and sister to former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. Twenty-five years ago, however, Tandon faced what she describes as a “crisis of spirit.” “I knew I had everything, and yet I felt like I had nothing,” she said. “If I died today, what is it that I want to have accomplished? Is it just more money, more climbing up the ladder, or was there something else that would just give me happiness and make each day complete?” That something else, she found, was devotional music. Pulling from the mantras she once heard as a little girl in Chennai, Tandon found a new purpose in creating melodies and “praying into the notes” as a form of meditation. “Music helped me find myself,” said Tandon, the creator of six albums of her own. And according to Tandon, the Grammy win signifies a larger cultural moment, helping young people all over the world discover the “extraordinary gems” of the ancient Vedic traditions. “Instead of a traditional Indian ornate piece of jewelry, I’ve simply put them in a completely Western jewelry setting,” said Tandon. “Suddenly it’s more apparent, it’s more discernible, more relatable. And suddenly there’s this curiosity about, ‘What is that? It makes me feel so good!’”

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https://religionnews.com/2025/02/17/hindu-devotional-singing-is-having-a-moment/

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