qyou are 32 and it was only about four years ago that you went pro we would sit by his record player and listen to music together startled he looked down and i realized it was actually former australian prime minister bob hawke looking down at me it was another one of those imustbedreaming kind of moments and he would ask me questions about what i heard and point things out qwhy opera the grandpa you are talking about i walked to his home every day after school and would be there till dinner time and i really love that he was such a warm kind lovely person although grandpa never visited india he was very fond of the indian people and thought extremely highly of the indian cricket team i did an undergraduate degree in science and psychology then honours and masters and finally a phd in medicine and psychology qhow did the india tour mumbai chennai new delhi come aboutai had the opportunity to sing for maestro mehta earlier this year and then he invited me to join him on this tour sports too and he was a big chopin fan and to be part of keeping that alive is a very precious thing to me i had planned on keeping singing as a hobby because i didnt want to rely on singing for my bread and butter why so late given that you have been playing instruments and singing since you were sixa also he tended to follow particular soprani like elisabeth schwarzkopf maria callas joan sutherland and victoria de los angeles i just ran out of the door as fast as i could i wanted to rid myself of the choice like sachin tendulkar actually both my grandpas were very musical did he influence your choice of careerahe influenced me very much he loved rodgers and hammerstein and andrew lloyd webber he also loved some of the musicals i remember when he came around he talked with me about my singing and about the repertoire and that was an afternoon i will never forget a soprano who has started being noticed by eminent conductors greta bradman might just be on the doorstep of fame in her own right looking back i see that he was quite consciously instilling in me this real love for classical music and it really helped last in me but eventually i could not stop taking it up as a profession since i love singing so muchqbut as a girl you tried to destroy your voice by drinking salt waterai was at a point in my life where i really didnt have any compassion for myself and i felt an internal struggle between singing and not singing but i will recount one quite funny incident from when i was 11 or 12 i thought it would override my sense of joy at singing everything was normal about growing up in donald bradmans household for the legendary cricketers granddaughter except when famous people