From the Oscars to Mindfulness: Amrita Sen, Singer-Songwriter, Entrepreneur, and Visual Artist

From the Oscars to Mindfulness: Amrita Sen, Singer-Songwriter, Entrepreneur, and Visual Artist

Artist, performer, musician, entrepreneur, and visual artist Amrita Sen has launched Amrita Sen Music to compose for different subjects such as commercials, feature films, television and live special events.

Amrita Sen is probably best known for her performance at the 2009 Academy Awards with music legend AR Rahman, singing “Jai Ho” from the Oscar-winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire. She has also performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Sen is the founder of the Indian-inspired fashion line BollyDoll and an accomplished entrepreneur. She has found composing as an immediate way to connect music to visuals and work in the metaphorical. In her opinion music composition with pictures is very prominent and remains like a combination of music and dialogue. In commercials, the music doesn’t have to be so literal, it just needs to help to represent the emotion of the brand. For composing music, Sen likes to first work out the basics on a harmonium, a type of free-reed pump organ.

Visual artist and musician; Education in music

Sen passed voice and music lessons and was taught classical Indian music and Western opera at a young age. She continued with rigorous training in classical piano, playing the harmonium, and went to India to learn music. In India, Amrita was schooled in the Indian classics from the late Gaan Prakash Ghosh, a celebrated singer, and from her own aunt, the late Geetika Sen. Therefore, she became a composer and performer with a unique sensitivity. She has received degrees from The Wharton School of Business and an MBA from Harvard. Sen’s music has Indian influences but it also has a lot of influences from western classical; because she has trained in piano and western opera. The audience follows her for Indian music but finds her as a very versatile artist. She writes both Indian music and English pop songs. Furthermore, Sen is a well-known entrepreneur, and has launched the successful Amrita Sen line of products including designs from her brands “BollyDoll” and “Cosmic and Eternal Love.” Sen debuted her BollyDoll illustrations at Art Basel in Miami. As a visual artist, she created “BollyDoll”, a live event combining immersive visual worlds with vocal performances spanning East Indian, African and R&B influences. This event of music and art launched an entire fashion and lifestyle brand.

Amrita Sen as a storyteller

As adult colouring books became popular and prevalent, Amrita Sen as a storyteller and visual artist, released an interesting colouring book as a gift collection, called Cosmic and Eternal Love. Sen’s first story BollyDoll” was originally created as a series of illustrations and later evolved into a soundtrack, a live show and eventually a fashion and accessories line that is distributed in department stores worldwide. This amazing book is inspired by the tale of Radha and Krishna from Hindu mythology and contains 15 original compositions. She Chose classic Indian mythology for her newly released colouring book as the idea of a series of illustrations and a girl’s perspective. She is best known for her performance of “Jai Ho” at the 2009 Academy Awards. Sen went on to collaborate with various artists such as Weezer, and Justin Timberlake.  In an interview with Living Out Loud – Los Angeles, she talks about her inspiration behind Cosmic and Eternal Love. At first, she didn’t know much about adult colouring books and the big market for them. Once she decided to start making adult colouring books, she made something, not like other mandala books and have a story behind the pictures. she wanted to have a story from a girl’s perspective because every myth is always from a guy. Sen was involved in numerous projects, so the synchronization of the music and illustrations of Cosmic and Eternal Love took a year to complete.

Amrita’s unique concepts

Wellness, healing and mindfulness are Amrita’s unique concepts in terms of stories from Indian mythology. She tries to present a new attitude about the potential of music to soothe her inner self and does this by taking a representation of the Buddha’s life. Amrita, which is fascinated by the sheer cacophony of pure health and mindfulness concepts, stores excerpts from her books about Buddha and its reports in music and art, and claims that this had been the constant procedure of merging writing with art. Amrita Sen is Originally from India, a designer, singer, manufacturer and entrepreneur who lives in the United States. As a musician, she has tried to combine visual arts with music. As an entrepreneur, she produces original Indian-themed art in a successful line of fashion and home products. Amrita Sen combines the creation of original artistic content with extensive business experience to commercialize unique products at retail. Amrita is a Hollywood-Bollywood crossover producer in the marketplace and has India’s largest vertically integrated studio, Pooja Entertainment. She works as a US-based designer, singer and film producer of Indian-themed products and entertainment for global markets.

Making podcasts

After the success of their previous podcast series "Music For", Amrita Sen and Dinis Guarda discuss mindfulness, sustained happiness and world peace at "Finding Your Atom" another YouTube podcast series. In episodes of "Finding Your Atom" commits the dynamic boundaries of the most basic principles of humanity are discussed. Finding Your Atom is focused on the primary idea of recognizing unique characteristics, to motivate the audience towards concepts such as mindfulness, sustained happiness, and world peace. The podcast is available on the

Amrita Sen YouTube Podcast

and

Dinis Guarda YouTube

channels. Amrita Sen as one of the presenters of this podcast tries to reveal the constantly battling to find success. This podcast shows the heroic journey of negating the cacophony of needless thoughts in life, in order to redirect oneself to find the fundamental 'particle' of happiness and peace in life. Amrita and Dinis worked on the journey of meditation and wellbeing with music in this podcast. They discuss the principles and practices for making the world a healthier and happier place. Amrita, as a reservoir of knowledge and deep thoughts, has gained its share of experiences in a rogue path of turmoil. Her strong belief is that the identification of one’s self is half of the way to winning the battle of life.