Prodigy Revisited
What's there to say of someone who showed his talent when he was just nine? And who has constantly rewritten the book on how to play Carnatic music on a quaint instrument called the mandolin? Perhaps there is. Because this ancient at 29 -- already a Padma Shri -- has achieved a remarkable feat of retaining audience interest and keeping pressure at bay. "Being called a 'prodigy' was not a pressure," he says. "The problem would arise only if one believed it."

So Srinivas simply does his thing. When acoustic got drab, he went electric. The chess player mixes with any genre that goes well with his mandolin and his mind. Jazz fusion concerts with jet-set violinist L. Subramaniam. Rocking Chennai along with ghazal whiz Hariharan. Merging belief and genius into a cd-rom on Adi Shankara, which he calls "a great honour". It so happens that he has about 30 students, some prodigies themselves, who think it's a great honour to be schooled in a once arcane art by the person who has taken it so mainstream that he takes his name from it.