For Chandrika & Ranjan Tandon
A living home
for the world's
oldest music.
We are building the first center on the East Coast where Vedic chant, dhrupad, Carnatic and Hindustani music are taught at university level, performed in a hall designed for them, recorded with reverence, and sent into the world.
We would like to name it for you.
Why this, why now
The oldest continuous musical tradition on earth does not have a single purpose-built academic home on the eastern seaboard.
Every other great tradition — Western classical, jazz, opera — has its cathedrals: Juilliard, Lincoln Center, Berklee. Indian classical and sacred music, alive for three thousand years, does not. The Hindu University of America's Pine Lake campus in Florida is the place to change that.
A 200-acre lakeside campus. A growing accredited university built for dharmic study. And a moment, right now, where one transformational gift can call something into being that no other institution on this coast has even attempted.
Why you
You have already done this once — for Western classical music, at NYU, for the largest single naming gift in the school's history. Chandrika brought a Grammy home to Hindu sacred chant. Ranjan built one of the most respected investment houses in America on the discipline of patient capital. Both of you, together, understand exactly what a long-lived institution requires.
This center asks for that same instinct, in service of the tradition that shaped you both.
"Music is the bridge between the soul and the infinite."
What your gift builds
A 350-seat Nada acoustics hall
Tuned for chant, dhrupad, Carnatic and Hindustani — not a retrofit black box.
An outdoor Pine Lake amphitheater
Open-air sacred concerts under Florida sky, year-round.
A spatial-audio sacred-sound dome
An immersive listening space no peer institution offers on this coast.
A professional recording studio
Every performance archived, broadcast, taught from.
The endowed Tandon Distinguished Chair
Recruiting one of the world's foremost Hindu performing-arts scholars.
New BA & MA tracks in Sacred Performing Arts
The academic anchor. Students. A succession plan for the tradition.
The ripple
One hall in Florida. Ten thousand voices a year. A tradition that keeps going.
An annual Nada Festival. A streaming archive that any seeker can reach. Generations of students who can say my teacher's teacherand mean it. The kind of gift that compounds for a century.
Built to last
A nonprofit cathedral that earns its own keep — with dharmic integrity, not compromise.
Capex from your gift. Operations from a diversified earned-revenue mix: tuition for the new degree tracks, ticketed sacred concerts, streaming subscriptions, sound-wellness retreats, mission-aligned corporate sponsorship, and the recording label. Every line is paired to its educational and dharmic purpose. Surplus is reinvested into the mission — never extracted.
The full 5-year projection, with scenarios, sensitivities and a clear endowment-gap number, is available on the Financials page.
The thing nobody else has
An immersive spatial-audio dome for sacred sound.
A 360° listening installation in the lobby — a permanent meditation on sound itself. No other Hindu academic institution on the East Coast has anything like it. It becomes the front door, the field trip, the donor story, the magazine cover.
The invitation
$1.5M a year, for five years.
The Chandrika & Ranjan Tandon Center for the Sacred Arts.
A pledge you can renew and expand into adjacent projects as the center proves itself. We are not asking you to underwrite everything. We are asking you to plant the cornerstone.
Naming proposed pending your consent. Confidential cultivation document, prepared by the Office of the President, HUA.