Art & Creativity Quote by Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar isn’t confessing a cute side project here; he’s staking out an artistic horizon that the Western spotlight rarely let him reach. By the time he became a global shorthand for “Indian music” (often filtered through the 1960s counterculture), Shankar had already done the hard work of being both tradition-bearer and modern composer. His “secret ambition” hints at a career shaped by other people’s expectations: concert halls, diplomatic-cultural roles, the sitar as a symbol. Animation, in contrast, is a medium where sound can carry narrative, atmosphere, divinity, and wonder without needing to perform authenticity for an audience.

The specificity matters. He doesn’t say “film” broadly; he says animation films, and he doesn’t name any story, but gestures to fairy tale, myth, Krishna. That’s not nostalgia. It’s a bid for a form spacious enough for Indian cosmology - playful, episodic, morally complex, sometimes surreal. Animation could translate raga’s elasticity and devotional intensity into visual metaphor, letting music lead rather than decorate.

Then comes the quiet bruise: “these sorts of chances don’t always come.” Subtext: the industry’s gatekeeping, the mismatch between his scale of talent and the kinds of commissions offered to a non-Western composer, the way “world music” fame can become a gilded constraint. The line reads like a lifetime of being celebrated in public while privately wanting a different canvas - one where myth isn’t exotic garnish, but the central engine.