#anoushka shankar

Photo by Carolyn Jones.

Q: “What did you learn musically from [George] Harrison?”
Anoushka Shankar: “Patience. We worked with a choir on Chants of India. But the recordings were difficult. The choir didn’t sing the way we had imagined it. I was totally irritated and ranted and raved that the entire choir should be kicked out and that everything had to be approached differently. George stayed calm. He simply adjusted his music to the choir and everything worked out. George took me aside later on and told me the story about the optimistic frog and the pessimistic frog. Both fell into a bucket of milk. The pessimistic frog drowned because he gave up immediately. The optimistic frog pedaled until he had turned the milk into butter and was saved. That impressed me.” - translated from ZEIT, 5 April 2016

“George Harrison, whom I was very close to, told me a story when I was fifteen. It was about two frogs. He said they both fell into a pot of milk, and one of the frogs, a pessimist, gave up straight away and drowned. The other frog kept trying to jump out, even though he failed again and again. He tried for so long that eventually all his jumping and swimming churned the milk to butter, and he was able to jump neatly away. I don’t always believe there’s going to be a happy ending to every event in my life. However, I act as if there might be, as without that shred of hope I wouldn’t keep on trying, and a sad ending would therefore become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” - Anoushka Shankar (on the best piece of advice she ever received), Man’s World India, 8 December 2016 (x)