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No kid’s stuff!
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Tara Venkatesan is only 12, but is an accomplished singer
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Tara Venkatesan
A singing paleontologist in space.” That’s what 12-year-old Tara L. Venkatesan told former President Abdul Kalam when he asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Tara, granddaughter of another former president of India, R. Venkataraman, loves dinosaurs — she never leaves a library without at least five books on them — and she loves space — she couldn’t get enough of the space simulations at a recent NASA space camp.
But the 12-year-old soprano’s first love was always Western classical music. “I was five years old when I heard an opera singer from Holland perform at a concert,” she recalls. “I pretty much knew I wanted to be an opera singer by the end of it.”
And so it was that she began training under India’s leading soprano Situ Singh Beuhler at the age of seven, and more recently, under Gerald Wirth, artistic director of the 400-year-old Vienna Boy’s Choir, in addition to learning Indian classical from none other than Pandit Ravi Shankar.
Several performances around the globe later, Tara still isn’t sure what exactly drew her to opera at so young an age. But she is certain that she wants to do charity, particularly to help children who’ve been less fortunate than her, and she’s come up with the concept of ‘Music-4 Kids By Kids’. That’s what has brought Delhi-based Tara and her family to Chennai — her first charity concert will be held in aid of SOS Children’s Villages of India — Chatnath Homes for abandoned, destitute and orphaned children on January 5.
That’s something the precocious seventh grader from the American International School Delhi has become pretty good at. In the summer of 2007, she spent three weeks performing solos in Vienna, Rabenstein, Ens and Salzburgh with the Global Children Peace Choir (GCPC) which is directed by both Pandit Ravi Shankar and Wirth (including a performance for the President of Austria). This February, she’ll be touring with the GCPC again, this time in India.
Meanwhile, she’ll be busy trying to discover her first dinosaur in India (“I’m going to call it the Tarasaurus!”), dreaming of her first India opera based on the Panchatantra tales (“Wouldn’t it be a great fusion?”) and oh, taking up mathematics, just for fun (“I love the logic!”). No ordinary singing paleontologist in space, this.
DIVYA KUMAR
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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