Arnab Chakrabarty is increasingly gaining recogition as one of India's
finest sarod players. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he does not come
from a family of musicians, and owes his success entirely to his personal
talent and rigorous practice. This, in a culture like India, is a rare
achievement, and that too in a family-dominated discipline like Indian
classical music.

Chakrabarty's parents enrolled him for music lessons when as a prodigious
three-year-old, he was able to reproduce almost any song he heard. Most of Arnab's musical training was had under the first-rate pedagogy of Buddhadev Dasgupta, one of the best-known sarod masters of all time. Chakrabarty also holds a degree in Ethnomusicology and Political Science from Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts) which he attended on a full scholarship.

Arnab's concert career began at the age of thirteen, and he first toured
internationally at sixteen. He has participated at many of India's
best-known music festivals including the IMG-Britannia Festival
(Bombay), Uttarpara Sangeet Chakra Conference (Calcutta), Radhika Mohan
Maitra Memorial Music Conference (Calcutta) as well as some of the top
concert venues of the country including the National Center for the
Performing Arts (Bombay), Rabindra Sadan (Calcutta) and Siri Fort (Delhi).

Among international venues of note, Arnab has performed at the United
Nations (New York), Museum of Fine Arts Millennium Festival (Boston), City Center (Chicago) and the Prague
Guitar Festival, in addition to scores of visits to leading conservatories
and music departments across Europe and the United States.

Presently a member of the neoclassical ensemble The Flywheel Trio along with
tabla maestro Debasish Sarkar and the ghatam virtuoso Somnath Roy, Chakrabarty's experimental spirit first found expression in an earlier trio in which he had paired with former PHISH banjo player Gordon Stone and bluegrass guitarist Michael Daves.

Born and raised in Bombay, India, Arnab Chakrabarty spent nearly seven of his most formative years in the eastern United States, and subsequently spent over a year traveling extensively throughout
Europe and North America, studying both peoples and musical cultures of
these lands. He currently lives in Calcutta, India, and travels abroad many times a year as a matter of routine. An eloquent ambassador for the cause of popularizing Indian music to a global audience, Arnab does
believe, however, that the true essense of this music can be appreciated only in India, while its flexibility and vastness allows it expressions that can be shared and appreciated abroad.

Awards:
* Youngest recipient of the National Junior Fellowship in the Arts from the
Ministry of Human Resources, Government of India (2000)

* Field research grant in Ethnomusicology, Hampshire College (2000)

Ford Foundation Endowed Int'l Scholarship to attend Hampshire College (1998)

* Three-time winner of National Collegiate Music and Dance Competition, 1995, 1996 and 1997