Practice Makes Perfect

For a nine-year-old, music practice can be a drag, meaning parents typically have to wield the baton, if not the whip. Anoushka Shankar was no exception when it came to shirking homework on the special miniature sitar her folks had made for her when she was that age. "They would sit me down periodically and say 'You don't have to do this. But if you do it, you need to be serious about it,' " she says. Anoushka Shankar became so serious that by the time she was 13 she was performing alongside her father, whose name is synonymous with the...