April 17, 2024 • 44 mins
Growing up in India, Chandrika Tandon broke with tradition to pursue her education and became a high-powered, glass ceiling-shattering partner at the consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. But a “crisis of spirit” led her to re-evaluate her life, leave behind her corporate position, establish her own company, while simultaneously pursuing her passion: music. In this episode, Chandrika talks with Emily about where she got her love for books, her hunger strike to convince her parents to let her attend college, arriving in New York City during the winter in a sari, her philanthropic work, and her Grammy nomination.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to She Pivots. I am Chandrika Tanden.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to She Pivots, the podcast where we talk with
women who dared to pivot out of one career and
into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted
these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Welcome back Pivoters.
(00:34):
This week, I'm delighted to share my conversation with Chandrika Tanden.
While you may not recognize her name immediately, I can
guarantee she's influenced your life in one way or another.
She made a name for herself as the first Indian
American woman to become a partner at McKinsey and worked
firsthand with some of their biggest clients in the nineteen
(00:54):
seventies and eighties. From there, she founded her own business,
Tandent Capital Associates, or she created billions in market value.
Like so many of our pivoters, Chandrika was the top
of her game when she decided to make her pivot,
poised to sign a massive deal with a European company. Sadly,
(01:15):
she was under ndaight, so we don't know the company.
She came to a crossroads. What did she want her
life to look like. Was she fulfilling that vision through
the massive success and business she had had until that point.
Was she enriching her life through art and learning like
she loved to do when she was a child. Stay
tuned to hear what Chandrika decided, How she moved forward
(01:38):
with intention, how music became the through line through it all,
and how in the end she became a Grammy nominated artist.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Enjoy. My name is Chandrika Tangent and I run a company,
I run a foundation, and I'm on a few boats.
I'm a tripothide person, I'm a businesswoman, I'm a person
who cares about society, and I'm an artist. So when
(02:08):
you were young, what did you think you wanted to
be when you grow up? I really didn't know what
I wanted to be. But I was born in a
very small village in a very small town in India,
and we didn't have the internet there. I'm sixty nine
years old, so we didn't have My world was just
a world of books. So my plans for myself was
that I was opening my world, opening the windows of
(02:30):
the world through books.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Growing up, Seandrika lived with her parents, siblings, and her grandfather.
Being the oldest sibling, she grew close with her grandfather
and credits him with leaving an indelible mark on her
and expanding her world through books.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
He was the love of my life. I'd come back
from school and go straight to him, and I read
all thirty seven plays of Shakespeare and all kinds of
obscure works and poetry and all that, because every evening
I'd sit with him. Whow And it's a wonderful example
of someone who brought himself down to me. You know.
(03:08):
So when I got involved with doing crossword puzzles, my
seventeen year old grandfather, he was in the seventeens or
maybe older than that, he would start to understand how
to do prosperts. When I got into chess, and he
started to play chess actively, So he was always my
companion doing what I was doing. And so that created
(03:29):
such a bond between us. What do you think he
imparted upon you? What did he bring out of you?
He opened so many windows into a world which I
didn't know existed. So we would read books like Thackeray,
I mean you probably you know they aren't normally read now,
(03:49):
the old English authors but you know the history of Bendettas,
which is a very boring book as you look at it.
But you know, years later, actually about five ten years
I was doing a walking trip in Cornwall and went
to Pendennis. There's actually a place called Pandennis. But you
know there you're sitting in Wadras, which has no internet,
(04:10):
which is not connected to any other part of India,
let alone any other part of the world, and you're
reading about far away places, ancient times, different cultures, different traditions,
because all we had was books. Some we had at home,
but we would keep going to the British Council Library
and the lending libraries and just red and Red and Red.
(04:30):
So he gave me the love of books because every
night I had a tradition with him. There was a
small black stool and I would sit on the stool
with him where he would get a couple of raisins,
so I would eat a couple of raisins with him,
where for one hour we had to just read and
it didn't matter. And I'd be falling asleep on this
little stool because it wasn't it didn't have a back support.
(04:53):
But my vivid memory is sitting there, but while you
are uncomfortable and falling asleep, and it wasn't homework time.
Whenever I think of that bench, I think of Pendennis,
and I think of Cymbeline, and I think of Macbeth
and Hamlet and school for Scandal of you know, Sheridan's rivals.
(05:16):
I mean, I've read so much and I memorized two
hundred poems. My mother's plans for me, however, were that
I would be married by the time I'm eighteen, which
was a legal age for marriage. So she was busy
collecting my trousso from the time I was three, because
you know, when you have the misfortune quote unquote of
having a girl, you have to provide for her her dowry.
(05:40):
So my mother was completely focused on that sort of
messages I was getting at home is you will be
married and off your go. But I, on the other hand,
was reading, was reading Shakespeare, was reading all kinds of
books and imagining some windows, some doors, something opening, but
I didn't know what that was exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Did you feel like your mother thinking about your future
as just as being married. Did you feel rebellious against
that or you just were interested in other things?
Speaker 1 (06:11):
The way it happened was I decided to go to
college in an all boys college, mostly boys college, to
study business, and that was a college my father had
been to and my grandfather had been to. And when
I decided to go there or I got into the program,
my mother said no way. So that's when my rebellion started.
(06:34):
Until then, there wasn't an active disagreement because I was
happily pursuing my interests and my mother was making her
plans for my life. But that led me on a
hunger strike. So I decided I wanted to go to
that college, and she said she wasn't going to let
me do that. So I said no, I was going
to go there because that was the only college that
(06:56):
offered business programs a commers program for women, and that
was also an hour away. I had to take a
train as opposed to go into the college next door.
So after a day and a half, almost two days
of a hunger strike, she gave up the none from
my convent school where I went to school, came out
of the convent for the very first time that I
remember to kind of plead with my mother. You know,
(07:18):
she's a good girl. You know, you really need to
send her to the school she wants to go to
the college she wants to go to. So that was
my first active rebellion.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
What was it about business that made you say I
have to be in this program?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
I wanted to do something that was not traditional, because
what I was geared to do was, you know, to
study literature, which was the program in the English. I
was good in English. I adopted a lot of the
school stuff, and it was expected that that's what I
would do. But then when I got into this very
new program, very prestigious program, I suddenly said I wanted
(07:58):
to go there. And then the moment the boundaries were
put on me, I started to rebel and said why not.
I guess if nobody had put a boundary, I wasn't
that passionate about business as such. I think it was
more that the boundary was put on me that I
couldn't go to this college. And I'd grown up with
stories about this college because it's a very very it's
(08:20):
one hundred and eighty five year old college at this moment,
it's one of the oldest colleges. And my grandfather, who
was the love of my life, would feed me stories
of the Scottish principles that founded the college and just
a Jesuit college. So I grew up with that, and
then suddenly there was this college that my father and
grandfather had gone to, and it had this program which
was unique and actually took in a few girls. So
(08:44):
why would I not go there? And why are you
telling me I can't go there? And that was what
the spirit was. So I wasn't actively thinking about rebelling
or going towards something at that moment. And by the way,
a lot of my friends at that moment didn't have
that experience. They didn't many of them ended up staying
there and settling in that same place because it was
(09:07):
a very simple existence where it wasn't written that you
were going to go out and plaze brave new trails
in the world. That wasn't the story that was written
for you.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
So Sean Drika wrote her own story and enrolled at
Madras Christian College, something not common for women at the time.
Every day she traveled an hour each way, slowly building
her independence away from her family, who at the time
still expected her to simply get married.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Well, the first place that you placed trails was being
one of the only women in this college what was
that like?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It was incredible and in fact, some of those three
years were some of the best years of my life.
So it was an incredibly sort of liberating experience for me.
I also did well in college. I was sort of
the valedictorian, and that gave me a great sense of
confidence in the sense of I explored these other dimensions.
(10:09):
I was studying, I was doing a lot of music.
I did lots of skits with the guys, you know,
we did a lot of plays. There were many dimensions exploded,
so it wasn't a very unidimensional education. Did you go
to business school immediately after? Right? So this was the
other the next phase of rebellion. So my professor, because
I'd done well in college, he said to me, you
(10:31):
should apply to this business school which takes you know,
there are about over one hundred thousand applicants and one
hundred people get in. But normally the people that apply
are two to three years ahead in terms of they've
done a five year degree engineering program and had a
couple of years of work experience. That's the typical profile
of the students that get in, whereas I had just
had a three year degree and in that I'd already
(10:54):
skipped a year of school, so I was so young.
But my professor said you should apply.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
She had set her sights on law school. She loves
logic and reasoning, and her grandfather was a judge. It
seemed only natural, but a switch flipped in her after
a frustrating conversation with her uncle.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
He said to me, oh, if I were you, I
wouldn't bother because it's like getting a Nobel prize. You know,
you really won't get in. That lunch finished and I
went home and I said I want to go to
this business school. I mean, I'm like so it was
almost like, how dare you tell me I can't go again.
It wasn't that I had this burning passion to do
(11:34):
business or anything. That's what happened. And I think this
has been the pattern. You know, when somebody says to me,
you absolutely cannot do it. When the boundary is put
on me, I kind of like to think about why
do I have this boundary? They don't give me a
good reason for the boundary. Yeah, and I don't want
a boundary. I don't understand. And I rebel.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Now, with her sight solidly set on business school, she
still had the matter of her family. Her mother continued
to pursue an arranged marriage for her traditional for the firstborn,
especially the firstborn daughter.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So while college was finishing, I was almost eighteen. So
every time my classmates would come, my mother would say, oh,
you're going to you know, you just wait and see
she's going to be married. As she's going to be married,
I'm going to find her. That's going to be an
arranged marriage. She had this, and I understand that because
you know, I was the first daughter, the first child
of the family. I had to uphold the honor and
(12:32):
if I had gone astray in any way, that would
have been a bad thing for the honor of the family.
And I was told this from the time practically that
I was born.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
You know, so you wanted to go to business school, right,
And we came to the second hunger straight.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
The second hunger strike, Yes, that's exactly. But by now
I was an expert on hunger strikes. So the second
time was here and my professor from college came in
to again. He brought an army of three guys who
were in that business school, and he spoke to my
mother to say, you've got to let her go. And
(13:09):
finally she relented. And then once I went to business school,
I kind of flew away. I basically left home. I
was no longer under under the control of mothers by
the night. Then I had a job, and then I rebelled.
I genuinely rebelled, you know. I changed my clothes. So
(13:30):
I kind of decided to be me as opposed to
be the sweet daughter of a traditional household and do
all the things I was expected to do. So I
moved in by myself into an apartment. I went to
Beirut after business school in the middle of the Civil War.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
This was once the richest part of the richest city
in the Middle East. Now it's the front line of
the war. In the Lebanon, buildings were stir the money
makers of the Western world exchanged their millions, and now
the barricades of Beirute. The war has lasted twelve months.
It has ruined the country and destroyed a nation. There
is supposed to be a cease far in the Lebanon,
(14:13):
but it means nothing. There have been twenty eight seaspars,
and each of them has been followed by even fiercer
fighting in Beirute.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Cease fars don't usually last long, and in Beirut it
was in nineteen seventy five. It was the worst civil
war you can imagine, and it was. And the City
Bank had given us apartments in il Rausche, which is
on the sea side, and we would for the first week,
first few weeks were fine, maybe three four weeks were fine.
(14:43):
Then the shelling started. You know, we would actually go
to the office in the daytime and come back in
the evening and buildings would be burning on either side,
or an entire block would have been shelled. And in
the middle of the night sometimes they would call us
all and tell us please evacuate your apartments and go
to the holiday because they would want all the City
Bank train needs to be in a safe place. But
(15:05):
interestingly enough, a few months later the whole holiday inn
was raised to the ground. But there's certain innocence that
you didn't know what you were into. And I think
this is war and what was happening. And I at
that time would still be wearing a sari. I didn't
own any Western clothes, and I'd happily walk around Beirut
(15:26):
in asari. And one time I'll never forget I walked
into from my apartment. I've just walked into a street
and two men with tanks and I spoke French. So
the two men with tanks were standing there and then
they said to me, we are going to spare you
because you're Indian, but please go back to your apartment.
Don't come to this area. So I had some near misses.
(15:48):
But I was so naive and so innocent. There was
an incredible movie called Lust for Life, story of Vincent
van Go and I've I've been wanting to see this
movie and it was playing in a Beirut theater and
the main theater in Beirut. It's a friend of mine
and I. We had like no money, so we knew
(16:09):
the tickets were like two pounds or something. So we
decided to go to the theater and say, you know,
they're shelling all around, we binds, we just go to
the theater. So we went there and the guy says
to us a lot, it's four hundred pounds that there's
the price. We're like, why four hundred pounds? He said,
because you're the only tool in the theater and I
have to do the whole I have to run the
movie for you. So we I mean that four hundred
(16:30):
pounds of the entire savings from the entire male a
few months we had so we said no, thank you
and went back and that evening that theater was raised
to the ground. It was raised to the ground. So
the next morning where we went to work, the theater
didn't exist. Do you think that I had a lasting
impact on your perspective moving forward? It made me understand
(16:55):
what hatred and anger can do to such beautiful places
and people, because people's emotions were so high, and we
were innocent and sort of shielded from what was actually happening.
But Beirut is probably one of the most beautiful places
(17:15):
in the world. The mountain meets the sea in its
most majestic way, and the streets were like the Alhamra
was like one of the most beautiful streets. They're like
it's like Paris on steroids. And everything was destroyed. The
relics were destroyed, the history was destroyed, and many many
(17:38):
have many friends who are Lebanese, and I've sort of
kept up with what has happened, and so it just
tells you that hedred and war don't really can destroy
things forever. Beautifilll never regain its majesty. So it colored
me that way that we all have to be really
(17:59):
aware of the consequence.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Chandrika was one of the last of the City Bank
employees to evacuate from there. She moved to Calcutta and
Bombay and continued to work for City Bank until she
was interviewed for a job at McKenzie. Unsurprisingly, she got
the job and moved across the pond to New York City.
We're going to take a short break for some ads.
(18:25):
Now back to the show.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And you arrived in the winter with no Western clothes
or no Western clothes. I had a you know, it
was a blizzard. It was that amazingly horrible blizzard of January.
It was the end of January. I hadn't really seen
snow until then. I don't think i'd seen snow. I've
never seen snow until then. And I came from a town.
When the weather became eighty degrees, everyone would say, oh,
(18:51):
make sure you take your shoulder, because you're so used
to one hundred degree and one hundred and five is
like the normal temperature. At eighty you might catch cold,
you know. And here I was in the middle of
the thing, and I borrowed a size twelve code. I
was about a size zero at that time. Was I
weighed nothing, but somebody lent me a huge thin coat.
(19:13):
And I had a yellow silk sorry I know the
exact still have that, sorry, and open toed slippers. And
I was straping around the blizzard of New York in
the Miczina. Be fortunate. It was like a three block
walk from the hotel, the Middletown Hotel, to to McKinsey's
offices on forty sixth Street. But I'll never forget the
(19:33):
bone chilling cold of my open toes touching the icy snow,
and on my feet are sinking in, my sorry, sinking in,
and then I'm going out to do sixteen interviews over
the next two days. I had a yellow Surrey and
a blue Surrey and I have just those. And you know,
there are thick silks and there are thin selts, and
I had the thinnest silk you can imagine. And nobody
(19:55):
ever asked me, are you planning to change your clothes once.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
You join us?
Speaker 1 (20:00):
That's interesting. No one asked me that because they knew
I was truly fob fresh off the boat, truly because
I didn't have the runway that people have when you're
coming to university. Here, when you come to university, you
can make all your mistakes. You know. It's a very enduring, loving,
(20:20):
cherished environment. You have classmates, you have professors, you're taken
care of your student services. I had none of that.
I went straight. I came and into the interviews and
then into the boardrooms.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Wow, So what was that like once you moved here?
It must have been a huge.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
My first week, my first day I came into because
it was like the Thursday or something, and then the
senior partner I was assigned to call me up and
he said, well, we're going to New Jersey on Monday morning.
Our client is in Abisco, and I expect you will
be in New Jersey at eight o'clock in the morning.
(20:57):
We have a meeting with the CEO. I'm saying okay.
I mean typically it's like someone says jump, you're supposed
to say how hi, And that's that's the training I had.
I remember, McKinsey was like the Brainiacs of the BRAINIACX,
very small, very prestigious, and this was a fantastically senior
part time. So I didn't really know how to drive.
So this is a Friday that he's telling me this,
(21:19):
So I call up various. I don't know many people
in New York either, so I try to find a
driving school from the Yellow Pages. So all weekend I
drove in Queens. I found a guy, and I didn't
have much money either. I mean, they've given me a
check which I haven't yet cashed, so I'm basically going
and driving around. I found somebody who would cheaply teach
(21:40):
me driving. I had a license which was from India,
which was like I would say, it's a bribe license,
because you know, I needed an international license. That's what
I had. I without much I mean, I passed a test,
but I didn't have any experience. So I drove for
like eight hours. But this was in the streets of Queens.
So Monday morning, I'm supposed to be in New Jersey,
(22:01):
in Parsipity in New Jersey at eight am, so I
look up the atlas and just figure out it's going
to be an hour to get there. I've never driven
on any highway. I don't know about slow lanes and
fast lane. So I go on this. I leave four
hours before the eight o'clock I left left home at
four thirty day or something, and I'm sitting on the
slowest lane and I'm driving at about five miles an
(22:22):
hour because I'm so scared to drive because I've never driven.
I'm saying, I don't want to hit anyone, but of
course everyone's giving me the finger, and I'm waving to
everybody because I'm thinking, how friendly Americans that all they're
doing is like you ask, get off the fast lane.
You're slowing up traffic. Because by then I was going
(22:42):
so slowly that you know, I was right in the Russia,
you know, by six thirty seven, on my way to
New Jersey whatever it was. And so finally I reached
New Jersey in time. I made it. Yeah, oh that's
the other thing, you know. And then in America the
roads bank, you know, they're slightly indented, I mean they
slightly inclined, and you don't notice that. So I thought,
(23:04):
of course I'd never really driven, so I wasn't sure
what the angle of the car was supposed to be.
So I'm stopping the car in the middle of the highway,
opening the door to make sure I don't have a
flat tire, because it somehow feels like I have flat
tires on one or two sides, but I wouldn't have
known what to do. So I'm thinking, I want to
make sure I don't have a flat tire. So these
ridiculous thoughts are going through my head. And then I
(23:26):
arrived in New Jersey, and then I learned my ropes.
How did you stay focused? I mean, you advanced quite
quickly within McKinsey. Your work must have been exceptional.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
How did you stay focused with so much to learn
about everything around you?
Speaker 1 (23:43):
You know, this basically was really my training ground. I
learned so much about myself. I learned so much about
how to deal with people, and I learned that I'm
capable of a lot more than I think I am.
You know, you're winning the pool saving They're saying you're
braver than you believe, You're stronger than you've seen. And
(24:04):
I think that's really I lived that we need to
pull maxim in a way because every in every setting,
I had problems. I had challenges. CEOs, senior executives from
the banking industry, which is one of the most traditional industries,
who've never really had a woman in the boardroom or
(24:26):
in any senior position, certainly not an Indian woman who
spoke funny, who spoke fast, who spoke differently, and didn't
have any common ground with them. So people would find
the most ridiculous ways to find common ground. This is
I'm talking of nineteen seventy nine. In nineteen eighty nobody
(24:48):
people just knew of India, as you know, somebody that
cows were on the road the taj Mahal. Everyone would
ask me about the taj Mahal. I hadn't even seen
the taj Mahall myself, and everybody would tell me about
that one Indian friend they had from some part of
the world, and they'd say, are you related to them?
And I'd want to explain to that that it was me.
(25:10):
Did have eight hundred million people and you know, so yeh, possibly,
but didn't sound likely. But after a while, you know,
this became a I started to think about it because
I would every time I would have this feeling in
the pit of my stomach, like, oh wow, why are
they talking to me like this? But they wouldn't do
this to anyone else. Then I decided, you know, they're
(25:32):
doing this because they're trying to find common ground. I
gave them the best I ascribed the best intention to them.
I think the second thing which I made as a
policy is that I decided that when I walked into
a room, I wouldn't think of myself as a woman.
I wouldn't think of myself as having come from India
(25:52):
or not, whatever it is. When I walked into a
room as a McKinsey associate or a partner, whatever I
walked in, I walked into the room because I was
the best there is. I had done an incredible amount
of work. I knew a lot about the issues talking about.
I was so well prepared, and I was there to
deliver what I came in for. I was very clear,
(26:14):
I was very confident, and if we wanted to debate
the issues, We're happy to debate them. So there was
no extraneous noise in my head. I never walked in unprepared.
I worked harder than anyone I knew. I was an
expert in whatever I did, and whatever I didn't know,
if people pointed it out to me, I went and fixed.
So that was my mot and I cared a lot
(26:36):
about what my clients thought. I cared a lot about
delivering value. So my mantra was impact. That's what my
life in Kinsey was about what my life and my
firm was about.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Seandrika's success in the world of business cannot be overstated.
After over a decade at McKenzie, working as the lead
on some of the largest mergers and accounts, she left
to start her own firm, Tanton Capital Associates in nineteen
ninety two. Business took off. In fact, anyone that she
worked with had to report it to the SEC because
(27:10):
their stock would immediately change. Yet throughout all her business achievements,
it was music that continued to play in the back
of her mind, that what if that we all have?
And it bubbled its way to the surface. I sang
before I could speak.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
And you.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Fit did as dude, befo. I mean, I did you know?
I told you we came from a very simple house.
I had so many jobs. You know, at four am
or four point thirty, the milkman would come and you
had to stand there and watch them milk the cow.
And that was all my job. We had those jobs,
(27:54):
so I'd just be singing. From that time on. There'd
be a radio station always playing music. Music was in
my brain and in fact I learned music when I
was younger, and then stopped because I went into the
whole business world in an intense way, but I was
still I was singing. But twenty three or nineteen ninety nine,
(28:14):
I had an epiphany, crisis of spirit. I just said,
I have to really look at my life and see
what makes me happy and what really would make my
life complete. And then that's when I said, I'm living
in such a selfish bubble of or you know. I
was very successful in my work, very successful company, had
(28:37):
lots of money, no one gave it to me. I
made everything myself. I came in with nothing, but I wasn't.
I wasn't living a useful life in that sense. And
so I wanted to expand my definition of what my
life was about. And it was a particularly difficult thing
to do because I was poised to take on a
(29:00):
very very large deal which would have vaulted my company
into another realm. It would have been personally very taxing.
It's a mega deal in Europe where I'd have had
to spend a lot of time there. But I decided
I needed I couldn't. I had to stop pause and
think about intentionally how I wanted to spend my time.
(29:20):
And I decided that whatever I did, I still wanted
to do my business, but music had to be part
of it. My happiest times had to do with music,
where I was singing with people by myself, and I
just didn't have time to do that much of them.
And the second thing I decided is that I wanted
to do something that didn't just involve me. I wanted
(29:45):
to clearly have a life of service of some kind
where I did, even if it's a random act of kindness,
that I would measure myself every day by something good
I did. No one needed to know it, but I
was going to do that. So I done enough for
myself and that was my commitment. So it's almost like
it this whole thing was a conversation with myself. And
(30:07):
that's when I went back to music and I started
to beg people to teach me because I wanted to learn.
I didn't want to perform. It wasn't for any of that.
I wanted to sing and I wanted to sing really well,
so I wanted to learn from the masters. And in India,
no masters will teach you when you were in your forties,
you know, because they take people to become their pupils
when they are five and they you know, the system
(30:29):
is that they you move in, you give up. It's
u a dimensional. If you're an artist, you don't do
anything else. But as here I was, I wasn't going
to give up the rest of my life. I just
wanted to sing for a few hours a day, and
no master was interested. But then little by little when
I you know, when they would work with me, they
would see so then everybody would say, oh, you're so good,
(30:51):
you really now need to spend all your time, come
with me, perform with me. But I couldn't do that either.
I wasn't going to walk away from my family. I
wasn't going to walk away from my company. I had
a daughter. So it was it was balancing these dimensions
and consciously creating a multi dimensional life with music as
a big piece of it, and service and my business
(31:16):
and my family became a very important juggling act. But
I started, I said, ultimately that became my definition of
success as well. Success to me then wasn't about money.
Success was simply having the freedom to do exactly what
you wanted and that in the way that makes you
(31:37):
most happy. And so to me, that's kind of how
my life ended. Up completely getting redefined.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
So from a functional perspective, how did you divide up
now that you've decided that you have these three prongs
that you're going to work on your business, your music,
and your service. Did you go like for a couple
of weeks in one bucket at a time and then switch?
Did you do all three at the same time? What
did it functionally look like for you? So the first
(32:06):
thing I did is I decided not to do this
make a deal. So I decided I wasn't going to
do deals that involved me going away from home for
months on end, living in different countries. That's what I
was doing. So I said, I was going to restructure
the business side of what I was going to do.
But you know, there's a roomy saying which says, when
you take one step towards the divine, the divine takes
(32:29):
ten steps towards you. And there's a universal synchronicity, you know,
when you decide you really want and it's the right
thing to do. And truly that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Seandraka took a step back, looking for a new way
to engage that could live at the intersection of music
and business. The universe truly rose to meet her when
she was offered a position to teach at NYU for
just a few hours a week. When we come back,
Schandraka talks about her new role at NYU and how
her work there allowed her to pursue music and art.
(33:05):
Now back to the show.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Next thing I know, I'm there three days a week.
I'm teaching classes, I'm working on strategy projects. I'm with
the dean like his shadow, you know. And we were
restructuring the school. We were doing so many great things.
So since I had an office at the business school,
I was doing my business there as well. But then
I started to just do music very religiously. So I
(33:29):
would find teachers and fly the teachers in or take
breaks in between, or just say, okay, I'm going to
go to India for two weeks when my daughter was
in camp, and I would not schedule deals at that time.
So it requires planning. It requires very As they say,
you know, your calendar decides what you do. You can
(33:51):
say all the things you like, but ultimately you have
to look at your calendar. Right. You can say I
want to do music, but if you're not singing in
your calendar at all, what does it mean, so I
had to really work to organize myself and I had
a lot of help, Universal's help between NYU and then
NYU also. Then that's how I got engaged with the NYU.
So the still in school, and then one thing led
(34:12):
to another. Then they invited me to the board and
then I started to get more and more engaged. What
was the connection there?
Speaker 3 (34:19):
So you gave and named the Tandon School of Engineering,
but very tight in with art and very tight in
with art right.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
So the art side. See, my sort of life goals
have really been around two themes. One is economic empowerment,
letting everybody have economic empowerment. And I think technology is
a very big way to get economic empoundent because technology
is changing every industry in ways like here we are
(34:48):
sitting and talking to the world within microphones and podcasts
and all of that. The music industry, the visual arts industry,
the medical industry, every it's changing and we ain't seen
nothing yet, I mean, the whole it's a wave. And
so to me that was a reason. So economic empowerment
(35:09):
to me is a very important part of where I'd
like to focus my attention. And so the investment of
the of the engineering school was because I just saw
that investing in that would really empower whole generations of
kids to be tech savvy and to be changed because
(35:30):
once they graduate from the engineering school, they are able
to get fantastic jobs. And so that was one angle
when we invested in the school. A very big proportion
of the school was first generation, first in the family
to go to college, and a lot of women, So
it was a very It was exactly the group that
I wanted to touch in whatever way we could. The
(35:52):
second side of the empowerment is emotional empowerment through music,
which to me, my lesson my own life is that
music was a great joy to me. But most importantly,
music helped me find myself because to really be a
good musician, you have to have a quiet mind. For
(36:14):
the kind of music I do, you have to quiet
all your senses, you have to quiet your thoughts, and
the more you quiet your thoughts, you start to get
into this deep place of joy, this place of bliss,
this place of deep meditation. So for me, music was
my gateway into meditation, into deep states of transcendence and
(36:40):
finding a greater joy. And that's why the music and
the service have gone hand in hand, because once you
feel that sense of deep connection not just with yourself,
but then you feel it with everyone, you feel it
for the world. You really want to be connected, you
want you feel it all one, you feel you want
to serve more. And so to me, that's been my journey.
(37:03):
So I wanted to really have music be part of
what we do to heal to for people to find
their own center. So every album I've done has been
variations of that idea.
Speaker 5 (37:24):
Hila Clari, Fenimol, Pomoney, j Truve, Lucy pelluam Me, Sweebee,
Hailiadotakushma Jemmy.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
A Grammy nominated artist. Chandrika has performed all over the world,
from Lincoln Center to the Kennedy Center to the India
World Culture Festival, and she shows no signs of stopping.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
The newest album I have started out as a just
as singing to my grandchildren, and then I put all
those songs together because I wanted to leave that behind
for them. But this has turned into something more because
I've been just singing these songs now with the children
in Ukraine, in Prague, with the refugees children in Ukraine,
(38:18):
and then I've just done this in Washington, DC. And
so it's become such an expression of intergenerational love where
people can sing together across ages, across borders. And most
of these children, not most, no one spoke English, and
yet they were singing these songs in English. They wanted
to do these chants in Sanskrit. So the journey I'm
(38:41):
on in this next phase of my life is part
of this. One of the key parts of the journey
I'm on is to really use music to sing with people,
and to sing with all ages in different languages as
a way of building community, as a way of building connection,
because I think it's a huge Music knows no boundaries
(39:03):
and music can heal. You don't need to be ao
boc to come together and meet song. So that's my
journey right now.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Do you think there's a piece that brings you back
to your formative relationship with your grandfather, the how you
can have this sing along moment with your grandchildren.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Absolutely? And what is what I think has been the
biggest revelation in this part of my journey now is
that it started out as a gift to my grandchildren,
but I suddenly feel like I have hundreds of thousands
of grandchildren, because in whether it was on Prague or
in Washington, the children wanted as many hugs as anything else,
(39:50):
and they loved singing. And I just got, you know,
so the reaction from the children and for myself, I
just feel this love blossoming in a d room fashion,
which I never thought possible, you know, because it was
initially it was a fairly narrow view, but now it's
expanded so much. So, Yeah, it's a wonderful flowering.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
What is one thing when you look back that you
feel like in the time, you thought, oh this is
this is allow, like this is really terrible, but now
in retrospect you see it as having really set you
up for the successful person that you are now.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I would say the crisis of spirit, because there was
something so traumatic and dramatic about walking away from this
mega deal, you know, and where I literally I was.
I lost all my moorings. I had defined myself as
a business person. My success quote unquote was the big
(40:50):
business successes I had. I was in every newspaper, you know.
I was an SEC that was a disclosable event. If
a company hired me, they needed to disclose it the
SEC because the stock price would go up and the board,
and this was one I thought I'd lost my mind
because here I came on a plane. I mean I
(41:11):
just met with the board all day Friday. So I
left Europe on Friday evening and I was on the plane.
I was the only passenger in first class, and I
start crying. Who does that? Not me? I was not
the crying sort, it's not I've told you my earlier
part of my life. I'm a tough cookie in a sense,
(41:31):
you know, But here I am just crying, and it's
not like something's fallen apart. I was just so lost
because I didn't know what I was doing. Do I
want to sign this deal? And then fortunately there were
no cell phones at that time, nobody could reach me
because they needed to announce it to the They were
doing a press release on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I
(41:52):
needed to sign the contract. I just told them, let
me go back to New York and and let me
do the final sign on the dot line. So I
get back and think about it. But in their mind
it was a done deal. And we'd had five six
months of negotiations to do this deal, so it was
it was not even just a low point. It was.
(42:13):
It was a complete deconstruction of who I was and
having to put myself back together again in a non
accidental fashion. I was an accidental person until then, and
I became more intentional person after that. That was the
(42:33):
biggest transition. But when I was in there, I thought
I was having a nose breakdown. I thought I was
having I was just like having a crying jag. Maybe
I was three menopausal. I mean, I put so many
labels on this because I didn't know, But it really
was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, the
(42:53):
luckiest thing. Well, thank you so much for joining us
in such a great conversation. Thank you so much for
having me. I've left talking to you.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Chandrika is continuing to create music and use her platform
and resources too, as she says, elevate human happiness. Be
sure to follow Chandrika on all social media platforms at
Chandrika Tanden to stay up to date on all of
her amazing happenings. Thanks for listening to this episode of
(43:25):
She Pivots. If you made it this far, you're a
true pivoter, So thanks for being part of this community.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did
leave us a rating, please be nice. Tell your friends
about us. To learn more about our guests, follow us
on Instagram at she pivots the Podcast, or sign up
for our newsletter where you can get exclusive behind the
(43:45):
scenes content, or on our website she pivots the Podcast
Talk to You Next Week. Special thanks to the she
pivots team, Executive producer Emily Edavelosk, Associate producer and social
media connoisseur Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson, Events and
(44:05):
Logistics coordinator Madeline Sonoviak, and audio editor and mixer Nina
pollock I endorse Cheap Pivots
Welcome back to She Pivots. I am Chandrika Tanden.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to She Pivots, the podcast where we talk with
women who dared to pivot out of one career and
into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted
these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Welcome back Pivoters.
(00:34):
This week, I'm delighted to share my conversation with Chandrika Tanden.
While you may not recognize her name immediately, I can
guarantee she's influenced your life in one way or another.
She made a name for herself as the first Indian
American woman to become a partner at McKinsey and worked
firsthand with some of their biggest clients in the nineteen
(00:54):
seventies and eighties. From there, she founded her own business,
Tandent Capital Associates, or she created billions in market value.
Like so many of our pivoters, Chandrika was the top
of her game when she decided to make her pivot,
poised to sign a massive deal with a European company. Sadly,
(01:15):
she was under ndaight, so we don't know the company.
She came to a crossroads. What did she want her
life to look like. Was she fulfilling that vision through
the massive success and business she had had until that point.
Was she enriching her life through art and learning like
she loved to do when she was a child. Stay
tuned to hear what Chandrika decided, How she moved forward
(01:38):
with intention, how music became the through line through it all,
and how in the end she became a Grammy nominated artist.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Enjoy. My name is Chandrika Tangent and I run a company,
I run a foundation, and I'm on a few boats.
I'm a tripothide person, I'm a businesswoman, I'm a person
who cares about society, and I'm an artist. So when
(02:08):
you were young, what did you think you wanted to
be when you grow up? I really didn't know what
I wanted to be. But I was born in a
very small village in a very small town in India,
and we didn't have the internet there. I'm sixty nine
years old, so we didn't have My world was just
a world of books. So my plans for myself was
that I was opening my world, opening the windows of
(02:30):
the world through books.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Growing up, Seandrika lived with her parents, siblings, and her grandfather.
Being the oldest sibling, she grew close with her grandfather
and credits him with leaving an indelible mark on her
and expanding her world through books.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
He was the love of my life. I'd come back
from school and go straight to him, and I read
all thirty seven plays of Shakespeare and all kinds of
obscure works and poetry and all that, because every evening
I'd sit with him. Whow And it's a wonderful example
of someone who brought himself down to me. You know.
(03:08):
So when I got involved with doing crossword puzzles, my
seventeen year old grandfather, he was in the seventeens or
maybe older than that, he would start to understand how
to do prosperts. When I got into chess, and he
started to play chess actively, So he was always my
companion doing what I was doing. And so that created
(03:29):
such a bond between us. What do you think he
imparted upon you? What did he bring out of you?
He opened so many windows into a world which I
didn't know existed. So we would read books like Thackeray,
I mean you probably you know they aren't normally read now,
(03:49):
the old English authors but you know the history of Bendettas,
which is a very boring book as you look at it.
But you know, years later, actually about five ten years
I was doing a walking trip in Cornwall and went
to Pendennis. There's actually a place called Pandennis. But you
know there you're sitting in Wadras, which has no internet,
(04:10):
which is not connected to any other part of India,
let alone any other part of the world, and you're
reading about far away places, ancient times, different cultures, different traditions,
because all we had was books. Some we had at home,
but we would keep going to the British Council Library
and the lending libraries and just red and Red and Red.
(04:30):
So he gave me the love of books because every
night I had a tradition with him. There was a
small black stool and I would sit on the stool
with him where he would get a couple of raisins,
so I would eat a couple of raisins with him,
where for one hour we had to just read and
it didn't matter. And I'd be falling asleep on this
little stool because it wasn't it didn't have a back support.
(04:53):
But my vivid memory is sitting there, but while you
are uncomfortable and falling asleep, and it wasn't homework time.
Whenever I think of that bench, I think of Pendennis,
and I think of Cymbeline, and I think of Macbeth
and Hamlet and school for Scandal of you know, Sheridan's rivals.
(05:16):
I mean, I've read so much and I memorized two
hundred poems. My mother's plans for me, however, were that
I would be married by the time I'm eighteen, which
was a legal age for marriage. So she was busy
collecting my trousso from the time I was three, because
you know, when you have the misfortune quote unquote of
having a girl, you have to provide for her her dowry.
(05:40):
So my mother was completely focused on that sort of
messages I was getting at home is you will be
married and off your go. But I, on the other hand,
was reading, was reading Shakespeare, was reading all kinds of
books and imagining some windows, some doors, something opening, but
I didn't know what that was exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Did you feel like your mother thinking about your future
as just as being married. Did you feel rebellious against
that or you just were interested in other things?
Speaker 1 (06:11):
The way it happened was I decided to go to
college in an all boys college, mostly boys college, to
study business, and that was a college my father had
been to and my grandfather had been to. And when
I decided to go there or I got into the program,
my mother said no way. So that's when my rebellion started.
(06:34):
Until then, there wasn't an active disagreement because I was
happily pursuing my interests and my mother was making her
plans for my life. But that led me on a
hunger strike. So I decided I wanted to go to
that college, and she said she wasn't going to let
me do that. So I said no, I was going
to go there because that was the only college that
(06:56):
offered business programs a commers program for women, and that
was also an hour away. I had to take a
train as opposed to go into the college next door.
So after a day and a half, almost two days
of a hunger strike, she gave up the none from
my convent school where I went to school, came out
of the convent for the very first time that I
remember to kind of plead with my mother. You know,
(07:18):
she's a good girl. You know, you really need to
send her to the school she wants to go to
the college she wants to go to. So that was
my first active rebellion.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
What was it about business that made you say I
have to be in this program?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
I wanted to do something that was not traditional, because
what I was geared to do was, you know, to
study literature, which was the program in the English. I
was good in English. I adopted a lot of the
school stuff, and it was expected that that's what I
would do. But then when I got into this very
new program, very prestigious program, I suddenly said I wanted
(07:58):
to go there. And then the moment the boundaries were
put on me, I started to rebel and said why not.
I guess if nobody had put a boundary, I wasn't
that passionate about business as such. I think it was
more that the boundary was put on me that I
couldn't go to this college. And I'd grown up with
stories about this college because it's a very very it's
(08:20):
one hundred and eighty five year old college at this moment,
it's one of the oldest colleges. And my grandfather, who
was the love of my life, would feed me stories
of the Scottish principles that founded the college and just
a Jesuit college. So I grew up with that, and
then suddenly there was this college that my father and
grandfather had gone to, and it had this program which
was unique and actually took in a few girls. So
(08:44):
why would I not go there? And why are you
telling me I can't go there? And that was what
the spirit was. So I wasn't actively thinking about rebelling
or going towards something at that moment. And by the way,
a lot of my friends at that moment didn't have
that experience. They didn't many of them ended up staying
there and settling in that same place because it was
(09:07):
a very simple existence where it wasn't written that you
were going to go out and plaze brave new trails
in the world. That wasn't the story that was written
for you.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
So Sean Drika wrote her own story and enrolled at
Madras Christian College, something not common for women at the time.
Every day she traveled an hour each way, slowly building
her independence away from her family, who at the time
still expected her to simply get married.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Well, the first place that you placed trails was being
one of the only women in this college what was
that like?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It was incredible and in fact, some of those three
years were some of the best years of my life.
So it was an incredibly sort of liberating experience for me.
I also did well in college. I was sort of
the valedictorian, and that gave me a great sense of
confidence in the sense of I explored these other dimensions.
(10:09):
I was studying, I was doing a lot of music.
I did lots of skits with the guys, you know,
we did a lot of plays. There were many dimensions exploded,
so it wasn't a very unidimensional education. Did you go
to business school immediately after? Right? So this was the
other the next phase of rebellion. So my professor, because
I'd done well in college, he said to me, you
(10:31):
should apply to this business school which takes you know,
there are about over one hundred thousand applicants and one
hundred people get in. But normally the people that apply
are two to three years ahead in terms of they've
done a five year degree engineering program and had a
couple of years of work experience. That's the typical profile
of the students that get in, whereas I had just
had a three year degree and in that I'd already
(10:54):
skipped a year of school, so I was so young.
But my professor said you should apply.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
She had set her sights on law school. She loves
logic and reasoning, and her grandfather was a judge. It
seemed only natural, but a switch flipped in her after
a frustrating conversation with her uncle.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
He said to me, oh, if I were you, I
wouldn't bother because it's like getting a Nobel prize. You know,
you really won't get in. That lunch finished and I
went home and I said I want to go to
this business school. I mean, I'm like so it was
almost like, how dare you tell me I can't go again.
It wasn't that I had this burning passion to do
(11:34):
business or anything. That's what happened. And I think this
has been the pattern. You know, when somebody says to me,
you absolutely cannot do it. When the boundary is put
on me, I kind of like to think about why
do I have this boundary? They don't give me a
good reason for the boundary. Yeah, and I don't want
a boundary. I don't understand. And I rebel.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Now, with her sight solidly set on business school, she
still had the matter of her family. Her mother continued
to pursue an arranged marriage for her traditional for the firstborn,
especially the firstborn daughter.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So while college was finishing, I was almost eighteen. So
every time my classmates would come, my mother would say, oh,
you're going to you know, you just wait and see
she's going to be married. As she's going to be married,
I'm going to find her. That's going to be an
arranged marriage. She had this, and I understand that because
you know, I was the first daughter, the first child
of the family. I had to uphold the honor and
(12:32):
if I had gone astray in any way, that would
have been a bad thing for the honor of the family.
And I was told this from the time practically that
I was born.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
You know, so you wanted to go to business school, right,
And we came to the second hunger straight.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
The second hunger strike, Yes, that's exactly. But by now
I was an expert on hunger strikes. So the second
time was here and my professor from college came in
to again. He brought an army of three guys who
were in that business school, and he spoke to my
mother to say, you've got to let her go. And
(13:09):
finally she relented. And then once I went to business school,
I kind of flew away. I basically left home. I
was no longer under under the control of mothers by
the night. Then I had a job, and then I rebelled.
I genuinely rebelled, you know. I changed my clothes. So
(13:30):
I kind of decided to be me as opposed to
be the sweet daughter of a traditional household and do
all the things I was expected to do. So I
moved in by myself into an apartment. I went to
Beirut after business school in the middle of the Civil War.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
This was once the richest part of the richest city
in the Middle East. Now it's the front line of
the war. In the Lebanon, buildings were stir the money
makers of the Western world exchanged their millions, and now
the barricades of Beirute. The war has lasted twelve months.
It has ruined the country and destroyed a nation. There
is supposed to be a cease far in the Lebanon,
(14:13):
but it means nothing. There have been twenty eight seaspars,
and each of them has been followed by even fiercer
fighting in Beirute.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Cease fars don't usually last long, and in Beirut it
was in nineteen seventy five. It was the worst civil
war you can imagine, and it was. And the City
Bank had given us apartments in il Rausche, which is
on the sea side, and we would for the first week,
first few weeks were fine, maybe three four weeks were fine.
(14:43):
Then the shelling started. You know, we would actually go
to the office in the daytime and come back in
the evening and buildings would be burning on either side,
or an entire block would have been shelled. And in
the middle of the night sometimes they would call us
all and tell us please evacuate your apartments and go
to the holiday because they would want all the City
Bank train needs to be in a safe place. But
(15:05):
interestingly enough, a few months later the whole holiday inn
was raised to the ground. But there's certain innocence that
you didn't know what you were into. And I think
this is war and what was happening. And I at
that time would still be wearing a sari. I didn't
own any Western clothes, and I'd happily walk around Beirut
(15:26):
in asari. And one time I'll never forget I walked
into from my apartment. I've just walked into a street
and two men with tanks and I spoke French. So
the two men with tanks were standing there and then
they said to me, we are going to spare you
because you're Indian, but please go back to your apartment.
Don't come to this area. So I had some near misses.
(15:48):
But I was so naive and so innocent. There was
an incredible movie called Lust for Life, story of Vincent
van Go and I've I've been wanting to see this
movie and it was playing in a Beirut theater and
the main theater in Beirut. It's a friend of mine
and I. We had like no money, so we knew
(16:09):
the tickets were like two pounds or something. So we
decided to go to the theater and say, you know,
they're shelling all around, we binds, we just go to
the theater. So we went there and the guy says
to us a lot, it's four hundred pounds that there's
the price. We're like, why four hundred pounds? He said,
because you're the only tool in the theater and I
have to do the whole I have to run the
movie for you. So we I mean that four hundred
(16:30):
pounds of the entire savings from the entire male a
few months we had so we said no, thank you
and went back and that evening that theater was raised
to the ground. It was raised to the ground. So
the next morning where we went to work, the theater
didn't exist. Do you think that I had a lasting
impact on your perspective moving forward? It made me understand
(16:55):
what hatred and anger can do to such beautiful places
and people, because people's emotions were so high, and we
were innocent and sort of shielded from what was actually happening.
But Beirut is probably one of the most beautiful places
(17:15):
in the world. The mountain meets the sea in its
most majestic way, and the streets were like the Alhamra
was like one of the most beautiful streets. They're like
it's like Paris on steroids. And everything was destroyed. The
relics were destroyed, the history was destroyed, and many many
(17:38):
have many friends who are Lebanese, and I've sort of
kept up with what has happened, and so it just
tells you that hedred and war don't really can destroy
things forever. Beautifilll never regain its majesty. So it colored
me that way that we all have to be really
(17:59):
aware of the consequence.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Chandrika was one of the last of the City Bank
employees to evacuate from there. She moved to Calcutta and
Bombay and continued to work for City Bank until she
was interviewed for a job at McKenzie. Unsurprisingly, she got
the job and moved across the pond to New York City.
We're going to take a short break for some ads.
(18:25):
Now back to the show.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And you arrived in the winter with no Western clothes
or no Western clothes. I had a you know, it
was a blizzard. It was that amazingly horrible blizzard of January.
It was the end of January. I hadn't really seen
snow until then. I don't think i'd seen snow. I've
never seen snow until then. And I came from a town.
When the weather became eighty degrees, everyone would say, oh,
(18:51):
make sure you take your shoulder, because you're so used
to one hundred degree and one hundred and five is
like the normal temperature. At eighty you might catch cold,
you know. And here I was in the middle of
the thing, and I borrowed a size twelve code. I
was about a size zero at that time. Was I
weighed nothing, but somebody lent me a huge thin coat.
(19:13):
And I had a yellow silk sorry I know the
exact still have that, sorry, and open toed slippers. And
I was straping around the blizzard of New York in
the Miczina. Be fortunate. It was like a three block
walk from the hotel, the Middletown Hotel, to to McKinsey's
offices on forty sixth Street. But I'll never forget the
(19:33):
bone chilling cold of my open toes touching the icy snow,
and on my feet are sinking in, my sorry, sinking in,
and then I'm going out to do sixteen interviews over
the next two days. I had a yellow Surrey and
a blue Surrey and I have just those. And you know,
there are thick silks and there are thin selts, and
I had the thinnest silk you can imagine. And nobody
(19:55):
ever asked me, are you planning to change your clothes once.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
You join us?
Speaker 1 (20:00):
That's interesting. No one asked me that because they knew
I was truly fob fresh off the boat, truly because
I didn't have the runway that people have when you're
coming to university. Here, when you come to university, you
can make all your mistakes. You know. It's a very enduring, loving,
(20:20):
cherished environment. You have classmates, you have professors, you're taken
care of your student services. I had none of that.
I went straight. I came and into the interviews and
then into the boardrooms.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Wow, So what was that like once you moved here?
It must have been a huge.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
My first week, my first day I came into because
it was like the Thursday or something, and then the
senior partner I was assigned to call me up and
he said, well, we're going to New Jersey on Monday morning.
Our client is in Abisco, and I expect you will
be in New Jersey at eight o'clock in the morning.
(20:57):
We have a meeting with the CEO. I'm saying okay.
I mean typically it's like someone says jump, you're supposed
to say how hi, And that's that's the training I had.
I remember, McKinsey was like the Brainiacs of the BRAINIACX,
very small, very prestigious, and this was a fantastically senior
part time. So I didn't really know how to drive.
So this is a Friday that he's telling me this,
(21:19):
So I call up various. I don't know many people
in New York either, so I try to find a
driving school from the Yellow Pages. So all weekend I
drove in Queens. I found a guy, and I didn't
have much money either. I mean, they've given me a
check which I haven't yet cashed, so I'm basically going
and driving around. I found somebody who would cheaply teach
(21:40):
me driving. I had a license which was from India,
which was like I would say, it's a bribe license,
because you know, I needed an international license. That's what
I had. I without much I mean, I passed a test,
but I didn't have any experience. So I drove for
like eight hours. But this was in the streets of Queens.
So Monday morning, I'm supposed to be in New Jersey,
(22:01):
in Parsipity in New Jersey at eight am, so I
look up the atlas and just figure out it's going
to be an hour to get there. I've never driven
on any highway. I don't know about slow lanes and
fast lane. So I go on this. I leave four
hours before the eight o'clock I left left home at
four thirty day or something, and I'm sitting on the
slowest lane and I'm driving at about five miles an
(22:22):
hour because I'm so scared to drive because I've never driven.
I'm saying, I don't want to hit anyone, but of
course everyone's giving me the finger, and I'm waving to
everybody because I'm thinking, how friendly Americans that all they're
doing is like you ask, get off the fast lane.
You're slowing up traffic. Because by then I was going
(22:42):
so slowly that you know, I was right in the Russia,
you know, by six thirty seven, on my way to
New Jersey whatever it was. And so finally I reached
New Jersey in time. I made it. Yeah, oh that's
the other thing, you know. And then in America the
roads bank, you know, they're slightly indented, I mean they
slightly inclined, and you don't notice that. So I thought,
(23:04):
of course I'd never really driven, so I wasn't sure
what the angle of the car was supposed to be.
So I'm stopping the car in the middle of the highway,
opening the door to make sure I don't have a
flat tire, because it somehow feels like I have flat
tires on one or two sides, but I wouldn't have
known what to do. So I'm thinking, I want to
make sure I don't have a flat tire. So these
ridiculous thoughts are going through my head. And then I
(23:26):
arrived in New Jersey, and then I learned my ropes.
How did you stay focused? I mean, you advanced quite
quickly within McKinsey. Your work must have been exceptional.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
How did you stay focused with so much to learn
about everything around you?
Speaker 1 (23:43):
You know, this basically was really my training ground. I
learned so much about myself. I learned so much about
how to deal with people, and I learned that I'm
capable of a lot more than I think I am.
You know, you're winning the pool saving They're saying you're
braver than you believe, You're stronger than you've seen. And
(24:04):
I think that's really I lived that we need to
pull maxim in a way because every in every setting,
I had problems. I had challenges. CEOs, senior executives from
the banking industry, which is one of the most traditional industries,
who've never really had a woman in the boardroom or
(24:26):
in any senior position, certainly not an Indian woman who
spoke funny, who spoke fast, who spoke differently, and didn't
have any common ground with them. So people would find
the most ridiculous ways to find common ground. This is
I'm talking of nineteen seventy nine. In nineteen eighty nobody
(24:48):
people just knew of India, as you know, somebody that
cows were on the road the taj Mahal. Everyone would
ask me about the taj Mahal. I hadn't even seen
the taj Mahall myself, and everybody would tell me about
that one Indian friend they had from some part of
the world, and they'd say, are you related to them?
And I'd want to explain to that that it was me.
(25:10):
Did have eight hundred million people and you know, so yeh, possibly,
but didn't sound likely. But after a while, you know,
this became a I started to think about it because
I would every time I would have this feeling in
the pit of my stomach, like, oh wow, why are
they talking to me like this? But they wouldn't do
this to anyone else. Then I decided, you know, they're
(25:32):
doing this because they're trying to find common ground. I
gave them the best I ascribed the best intention to them.
I think the second thing which I made as a
policy is that I decided that when I walked into
a room, I wouldn't think of myself as a woman.
I wouldn't think of myself as having come from India
(25:52):
or not, whatever it is. When I walked into a
room as a McKinsey associate or a partner, whatever I
walked in, I walked into the room because I was
the best there is. I had done an incredible amount
of work. I knew a lot about the issues talking about.
I was so well prepared, and I was there to
deliver what I came in for. I was very clear,
(26:14):
I was very confident, and if we wanted to debate
the issues, We're happy to debate them. So there was
no extraneous noise in my head. I never walked in unprepared.
I worked harder than anyone I knew. I was an
expert in whatever I did, and whatever I didn't know,
if people pointed it out to me, I went and fixed.
So that was my mot and I cared a lot
(26:36):
about what my clients thought. I cared a lot about
delivering value. So my mantra was impact. That's what my
life in Kinsey was about what my life and my
firm was about.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Seandrika's success in the world of business cannot be overstated.
After over a decade at McKenzie, working as the lead
on some of the largest mergers and accounts, she left
to start her own firm, Tanton Capital Associates in nineteen
ninety two. Business took off. In fact, anyone that she
worked with had to report it to the SEC because
(27:10):
their stock would immediately change. Yet throughout all her business achievements,
it was music that continued to play in the back
of her mind, that what if that we all have?
And it bubbled its way to the surface. I sang
before I could speak.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
And you.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Fit did as dude, befo. I mean, I did you know?
I told you we came from a very simple house.
I had so many jobs. You know, at four am
or four point thirty, the milkman would come and you
had to stand there and watch them milk the cow.
And that was all my job. We had those jobs,
(27:54):
so I'd just be singing. From that time on. There'd
be a radio station always playing music. Music was in
my brain and in fact I learned music when I
was younger, and then stopped because I went into the
whole business world in an intense way, but I was
still I was singing. But twenty three or nineteen ninety nine,
(28:14):
I had an epiphany, crisis of spirit. I just said,
I have to really look at my life and see
what makes me happy and what really would make my
life complete. And then that's when I said, I'm living
in such a selfish bubble of or you know. I
was very successful in my work, very successful company, had
(28:37):
lots of money, no one gave it to me. I
made everything myself. I came in with nothing, but I wasn't.
I wasn't living a useful life in that sense. And
so I wanted to expand my definition of what my
life was about. And it was a particularly difficult thing
to do because I was poised to take on a
(29:00):
very very large deal which would have vaulted my company
into another realm. It would have been personally very taxing.
It's a mega deal in Europe where I'd have had
to spend a lot of time there. But I decided
I needed I couldn't. I had to stop pause and
think about intentionally how I wanted to spend my time.
(29:20):
And I decided that whatever I did, I still wanted
to do my business, but music had to be part
of it. My happiest times had to do with music,
where I was singing with people by myself, and I
just didn't have time to do that much of them.
And the second thing I decided is that I wanted
to do something that didn't just involve me. I wanted
(29:45):
to clearly have a life of service of some kind
where I did, even if it's a random act of kindness,
that I would measure myself every day by something good
I did. No one needed to know it, but I
was going to do that. So I done enough for
myself and that was my commitment. So it's almost like
it this whole thing was a conversation with myself. And
(30:07):
that's when I went back to music and I started
to beg people to teach me because I wanted to learn.
I didn't want to perform. It wasn't for any of that.
I wanted to sing and I wanted to sing really well,
so I wanted to learn from the masters. And in India,
no masters will teach you when you were in your forties,
you know, because they take people to become their pupils
when they are five and they you know, the system
(30:29):
is that they you move in, you give up. It's
u a dimensional. If you're an artist, you don't do
anything else. But as here I was, I wasn't going
to give up the rest of my life. I just
wanted to sing for a few hours a day, and
no master was interested. But then little by little when
I you know, when they would work with me, they
would see so then everybody would say, oh, you're so good,
(30:51):
you really now need to spend all your time, come
with me, perform with me. But I couldn't do that either.
I wasn't going to walk away from my family. I
wasn't going to walk away from my company. I had
a daughter. So it was it was balancing these dimensions
and consciously creating a multi dimensional life with music as
a big piece of it, and service and my business
(31:16):
and my family became a very important juggling act. But
I started, I said, ultimately that became my definition of
success as well. Success to me then wasn't about money.
Success was simply having the freedom to do exactly what
you wanted and that in the way that makes you
(31:37):
most happy. And so to me, that's kind of how
my life ended. Up completely getting redefined.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
So from a functional perspective, how did you divide up
now that you've decided that you have these three prongs
that you're going to work on your business, your music,
and your service. Did you go like for a couple
of weeks in one bucket at a time and then switch?
Did you do all three at the same time? What
did it functionally look like for you? So the first
(32:06):
thing I did is I decided not to do this
make a deal. So I decided I wasn't going to
do deals that involved me going away from home for
months on end, living in different countries. That's what I
was doing. So I said, I was going to restructure
the business side of what I was going to do.
But you know, there's a roomy saying which says, when
you take one step towards the divine, the divine takes
(32:29):
ten steps towards you. And there's a universal synchronicity, you know,
when you decide you really want and it's the right
thing to do. And truly that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Seandraka took a step back, looking for a new way
to engage that could live at the intersection of music
and business. The universe truly rose to meet her when
she was offered a position to teach at NYU for
just a few hours a week. When we come back,
Schandraka talks about her new role at NYU and how
her work there allowed her to pursue music and art.
(33:05):
Now back to the show.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Next thing I know, I'm there three days a week.
I'm teaching classes, I'm working on strategy projects. I'm with
the dean like his shadow, you know. And we were
restructuring the school. We were doing so many great things.
So since I had an office at the business school,
I was doing my business there as well. But then
I started to just do music very religiously. So I
(33:29):
would find teachers and fly the teachers in or take
breaks in between, or just say, okay, I'm going to
go to India for two weeks when my daughter was
in camp, and I would not schedule deals at that time.
So it requires planning. It requires very As they say,
you know, your calendar decides what you do. You can
(33:51):
say all the things you like, but ultimately you have
to look at your calendar. Right. You can say I
want to do music, but if you're not singing in
your calendar at all, what does it mean, so I
had to really work to organize myself and I had
a lot of help, Universal's help between NYU and then
NYU also. Then that's how I got engaged with the NYU.
So the still in school, and then one thing led
(34:12):
to another. Then they invited me to the board and
then I started to get more and more engaged. What
was the connection there?
Speaker 3 (34:19):
So you gave and named the Tandon School of Engineering,
but very tight in with art and very tight in
with art right.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
So the art side. See, my sort of life goals
have really been around two themes. One is economic empowerment,
letting everybody have economic empowerment. And I think technology is
a very big way to get economic empoundent because technology
is changing every industry in ways like here we are
(34:48):
sitting and talking to the world within microphones and podcasts
and all of that. The music industry, the visual arts industry,
the medical industry, every it's changing and we ain't seen
nothing yet, I mean, the whole it's a wave. And
so to me that was a reason. So economic empowerment
(35:09):
to me is a very important part of where I'd
like to focus my attention. And so the investment of
the of the engineering school was because I just saw
that investing in that would really empower whole generations of
kids to be tech savvy and to be changed because
(35:30):
once they graduate from the engineering school, they are able
to get fantastic jobs. And so that was one angle
when we invested in the school. A very big proportion
of the school was first generation, first in the family
to go to college, and a lot of women, So
it was a very It was exactly the group that
I wanted to touch in whatever way we could. The
(35:52):
second side of the empowerment is emotional empowerment through music,
which to me, my lesson my own life is that
music was a great joy to me. But most importantly,
music helped me find myself because to really be a
good musician, you have to have a quiet mind. For
(36:14):
the kind of music I do, you have to quiet
all your senses, you have to quiet your thoughts, and
the more you quiet your thoughts, you start to get
into this deep place of joy, this place of bliss,
this place of deep meditation. So for me, music was
my gateway into meditation, into deep states of transcendence and
(36:40):
finding a greater joy. And that's why the music and
the service have gone hand in hand, because once you
feel that sense of deep connection not just with yourself,
but then you feel it with everyone, you feel it
for the world. You really want to be connected, you
want you feel it all one, you feel you want
to serve more. And so to me, that's been my journey.
(37:03):
So I wanted to really have music be part of
what we do to heal to for people to find
their own center. So every album I've done has been
variations of that idea.
Speaker 5 (37:24):
Hila Clari, Fenimol, Pomoney, j Truve, Lucy pelluam Me, Sweebee,
Hailiadotakushma Jemmy.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
A Grammy nominated artist. Chandrika has performed all over the world,
from Lincoln Center to the Kennedy Center to the India
World Culture Festival, and she shows no signs of stopping.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
The newest album I have started out as a just
as singing to my grandchildren, and then I put all
those songs together because I wanted to leave that behind
for them. But this has turned into something more because
I've been just singing these songs now with the children
in Ukraine, in Prague, with the refugees children in Ukraine,
(38:18):
and then I've just done this in Washington, DC. And
so it's become such an expression of intergenerational love where
people can sing together across ages, across borders. And most
of these children, not most, no one spoke English, and
yet they were singing these songs in English. They wanted
to do these chants in Sanskrit. So the journey I'm
(38:41):
on in this next phase of my life is part
of this. One of the key parts of the journey
I'm on is to really use music to sing with people,
and to sing with all ages in different languages as
a way of building community, as a way of building connection,
because I think it's a huge Music knows no boundaries
(39:03):
and music can heal. You don't need to be ao
boc to come together and meet song. So that's my
journey right now.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Do you think there's a piece that brings you back
to your formative relationship with your grandfather, the how you
can have this sing along moment with your grandchildren.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Absolutely? And what is what I think has been the
biggest revelation in this part of my journey now is
that it started out as a gift to my grandchildren,
but I suddenly feel like I have hundreds of thousands
of grandchildren, because in whether it was on Prague or
in Washington, the children wanted as many hugs as anything else,
(39:50):
and they loved singing. And I just got, you know,
so the reaction from the children and for myself, I
just feel this love blossoming in a d room fashion,
which I never thought possible, you know, because it was
initially it was a fairly narrow view, but now it's
expanded so much. So, Yeah, it's a wonderful flowering.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
What is one thing when you look back that you
feel like in the time, you thought, oh this is
this is allow, like this is really terrible, but now
in retrospect you see it as having really set you
up for the successful person that you are now.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I would say the crisis of spirit, because there was
something so traumatic and dramatic about walking away from this
mega deal, you know, and where I literally I was.
I lost all my moorings. I had defined myself as
a business person. My success quote unquote was the big
(40:50):
business successes I had. I was in every newspaper, you know.
I was an SEC that was a disclosable event. If
a company hired me, they needed to disclose it the
SEC because the stock price would go up and the board,
and this was one I thought I'd lost my mind
because here I came on a plane. I mean I
(41:11):
just met with the board all day Friday. So I
left Europe on Friday evening and I was on the plane.
I was the only passenger in first class, and I
start crying. Who does that? Not me? I was not
the crying sort, it's not I've told you my earlier
part of my life. I'm a tough cookie in a sense,
(41:31):
you know, But here I am just crying, and it's
not like something's fallen apart. I was just so lost
because I didn't know what I was doing. Do I
want to sign this deal? And then fortunately there were
no cell phones at that time, nobody could reach me
because they needed to announce it to the They were
doing a press release on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I
(41:52):
needed to sign the contract. I just told them, let
me go back to New York and and let me
do the final sign on the dot line. So I
get back and think about it. But in their mind
it was a done deal. And we'd had five six
months of negotiations to do this deal, so it was
it was not even just a low point. It was.
(42:13):
It was a complete deconstruction of who I was and
having to put myself back together again in a non
accidental fashion. I was an accidental person until then, and
I became more intentional person after that. That was the
(42:33):
biggest transition. But when I was in there, I thought
I was having a nose breakdown. I thought I was
having I was just like having a crying jag. Maybe
I was three menopausal. I mean, I put so many
labels on this because I didn't know, But it really
was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, the
(42:53):
luckiest thing. Well, thank you so much for joining us
in such a great conversation. Thank you so much for
having me. I've left talking to you.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Chandrika is continuing to create music and use her platform
and resources too, as she says, elevate human happiness. Be
sure to follow Chandrika on all social media platforms at
Chandrika Tanden to stay up to date on all of
her amazing happenings. Thanks for listening to this episode of
(43:25):
She Pivots. If you made it this far, you're a
true pivoter, So thanks for being part of this community.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did
leave us a rating, please be nice. Tell your friends
about us. To learn more about our guests, follow us
on Instagram at she pivots the Podcast, or sign up
for our newsletter where you can get exclusive behind the
(43:45):
scenes content, or on our website she pivots the Podcast
Talk to You Next Week. Special thanks to the she
pivots team, Executive producer Emily Edavelosk, Associate producer and social
media connoisseur Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson, Events and
(44:05):
Logistics coordinator Madeline Sonoviak, and audio editor and mixer Nina
pollock I endorse Cheap Pivots
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