Aishwarya Natarajan

Aishwarya Natarajan was from a musical family practically from birth. Her father, R.C. Natarajan, a government employee, is originally from Bobbili, an Andhra Pradesh village famous for its Veenas. Her mother, Tara Natarajan, was once an All-India Radio performer. This is not where the musical link ends. Her grandmother still plays the Veena, while her brother Sukumar Natarajan is a guitarist, table, mandolinist, and drummer. Aishwarya Natarajan has founded a firm, Indianuance. She manages Shashank, a gifted young flutist, through her firm.

On February 23, she took home the Young Creative Entrepreneur (Y.C.E.) Music Award 2011 from the British Council. As a part of the prize, she was allowed to fly to Brighton and London to showcase her business and idea. Aishwarya Natarajan began her career as a Knowledge Process Outsourcing (K.P.O.) employee before working for Music Today and Sa Re Ga Ma, two well-known record companies.

Aishwarya got her job through campus placement at a K.P.O. company in Gurgaon. She had to coordinate with individuals in the U.S., thus the work hours were lengthy and the timings were irregular. She has been studying Carnatic classical music for more than 22 years and sings, so she was finding it difficult to concentrate on her singing. In addition to that, she was performing an action she knew nothing about. She therefore resigned and asked her parents to look after her while she looked for work.

Aishwarya applied to record labels after doing some research. However, her mother took great offense at the fact that she had no interest in anybody associated with Bollywood music. She narrowed down the record labels she wanted to collaborate with, went to their offices, and left her resume at the front desk, unsure if it would reach the proper person. At last, on the day of the interview, she received a call from Music Today offering her the position. She was assigned to Chennai for the first six months to simply conduct conversations and establish channels of communication with the artists.

Eventually, she contributed to the nearly extinct Carnatic music archive of Music Today being revived. She was confident she didn’t want to join another music label when she moved to Mumbai, after marrying investment banker Ramesh Ramanathan, despite having been entangled in the music industry for more than five years. And even though, Aishwarya came dangerously close to landing a career in a completely unrelated field, she realised that she might never be content being apart from her first love, music.