What is the highest honour conferred by the Sangeet Natak Akademi?

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 C, Best World Music Album. Planet Drum, a percussion project led by Mickey Hart with Zakir Hussain among its players, won in 1992 the very first Grammy ever given in that newly created category. Option A is wrong because Best New Age Album is the category in which Ricky Kej won for Winds of Samsara and later for Divine Tides, a different stream of the awards. Option B is wrong because Best Contemporary Instrumental Album is a separate category, one in which Zakir Hussain won much later in his career. Option D is wrong because Best Global Music Performance is a modern renaming of the world music stream and did not exist in 1992. Remember the chain: Planet Drum, 1992, Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain, the first world music Grammy.