Google Celebrates Pandit Ravi Shankar's 96th Birthday

Google celebrates Pandit Ravi Shankar's 96th birthday with a special doodle

Google is celebrating legendary musician and Bharat Ratna recipient Pandit Ravi Shankar's 96th birthday with a special Google doodle which has a standing sitar as the centrepiece.

"Shankar, evangelised the use of Indian instruments in Western music, introducing the atmospheric hum of the sitar to audiences worldwide," the search engine giant said.

At the centre of today's Doodle, by artist Kevin Laughlin, is a standing sitar, with two bridges, one for the "drone" strings and the other for the melody strings.

Laughlin's design shows the style of sitar Shankar played, which includes a second gourd-shape resonator at the top of the instrument's neck.

Shankar famously taught George Harrison of the Beatles to play the sitar, and widely influenced popular music in the 1960s and 70s and his music popularised the fundamentals of Indian music, including raga, a melodic form.

Raga, as Shankar explained, has "its own peculiar ascending and descending movement consisting of either a full seven-note octave, or a series of six or five notes in a rising or falling structure."

Born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhry in 1920 to a Bengali family in Varanasi, the musician and composer spent his younger days touring the country with his elder brother Uday Shankar's dance troupe.

He gave up dancing to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. He went on to become the music director of All India Radio and the musician also worked as a composer.

He performed frequently with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and composed a concerto with sitar for the London Symphony Orchestra. 

The legendary musician who passed away in 2012 at the age of 92 has been conferred with a Bharat Ratna, the Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.

The doodle on Shankar has been viewed mostly in the US, Sweden, Kazhakasthan, Lithuania, India, Indonesia and Japan, according to the search giant, which makes fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous changes to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists.