The album Planet Drum, for which Ustad Zakir Hussain shared a Grammy with Mickey Hart, won the first ever award in which category?

The correct answer is B, Pandit Ravi Shankar. The sitar maestro won the Grammy in 1968 for Best Chamber Music Performance for the album West Meets East, which he recorded with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, making him the first Indian to receive the award. He later won further Grammys and was given the Recording Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Option A is wrong because Ustad Zakir Hussain won later, in 1992, with Mickey Hart for Planet Drum. Option C is wrong because A. R. Rahman's two Grammys came in 2010 for Slumdog Millionaire, more than forty years after Ravi Shankar. Option D is wrong because Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, the Kirana gharana vocalist, received the Bharat Ratna and the Sangeet Natak Akademi honours but never a Grammy. Fix the pair Ravi Shankar and 1968 in memory.

The correct answer is C, the Recording Academy. Its formal name is the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and its voting members are musicians, producers, recording engineers and other professionals of the American recording industry. Option A is wrong because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives the Academy Awards, that is the Oscars, which honour cinema and not recordings. Option B is wrong because the Royal Swedish Academy of Music is associated with the Polar Music Prize of Sweden, a different honour that Ravi Shankar received in 1998. Option D is wrong because the British Academy of Film and Television Arts gives the BAFTA awards in the United Kingdom; the leading British music awards are the BRIT Awards instead. A useful memory hook is that the Grammy belongs to recording, the Oscar to film and the BAFTA to British film and television.

The correct answer is B, Song of the Year. This category honours the composition itself, that is the words and the music, so the trophy goes to the songwriter or composer rather than to the person who sang or produced the track. Option A is wrong because Record of the Year honours a single track as a finished recording and is given to the performing artist along with the producer and the engineer. Option C is wrong because Album of the Year honours a complete album and is shared by the artist and the album production team. Option D is wrong because Best New Artist is given to a performer who broke through during the eligibility year and has nothing to do with writing. The line to memorise is simple: Record rewards the performance of a track, Song rewards the writing of it.

The correct answer is B, Slumdog Millionaire. Rahman took one Grammy for the compilation soundtrack album of the film and a second, shared with the lyricists Gulzar and Tanvi Shah, for the song Jai Ho; through that second award Tanvi Shah became the first Indian woman to win a Grammy. The same film had already brought Rahman two Academy Awards in 2009. Option A is wrong because Roja, his debut film score of 1992, brought him the National Film Award for Best Music Direction but no Grammy. Option C is wrong because Lagaan was nominated for the Academy Award in the foreign language film category but did not win a Grammy for its music. Option D is wrong because the score of Life of Pi was composed by Mychael Danna, not by Rahman.

The correct answer is B, 1959. The Recording Academy held its first Grammy ceremony on 4 May 1959 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, and it honoured the recordings released during 1958. The trophy handed out that evening was the small gilded gramophone that still gives the award its name. Option A is wrong because in 1949 the recording industry was still using the older trade listings and the Academy itself had not yet been formed. Option C is wrong because 1969 is a decade too late; by then Pandit Ravi Shankar had already won his first Grammy, in 1968. Option D is wrong because 1979 falls two decades after the first ceremony. A handy anchor is that the Grammys began in the same era as colour television in the United States, nearly thirty years after the Academy Awards for cinema.