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Zubin's father, Mehli Mehta, was Bombay's leading musician, a violinist who played dinner music at the Taj Mahal Hotel, in his spare time served as conductor of the Bombay Symphony. Little wonder, then, that Zubin says he was "brainwashed with classical music from the cradle." He had his own record player when he was two years old, later crouched wide-eyed in the corner during his father's lessons and chamber-music rehearsals. With his retentive memory and faultless ear, he was soon whistling Paganini caprices in the original key while riding his bike or playing cricket.
Zubin studied violin and piano, but played indifferently and never joined his school orchestra. By the age of eleven, he knew that he was more interested in becoming a conductor like his father, and like the great figures (Artur Rodzinski, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski) that he saw in the 1947 film Carnegie Hall; a fanatic moviegoer to this day, he sat through it six times. His father, discouraged at the prospects for Western music in India, started him in pre-med courses. "Every time I sat down to cut up a dogfish," Zubin recalls, "there I was with a Brahms symphony running through my head."
Ice Cream & Orange Juice. Finally Mehli Mehta relented, began teaching him the rudiments of the baton. One day, when Zubin was 16, his father let him conduct a Bombay Symphony rehearsal. "The moment he got onto the podium," says Bombay Cellist George Lester, "he instantly took command, gave us our correct cues and put us under his spell."
At 18, Zubin was packed off to the Vienna Academy, where $75 a month had to suffice for his teetotaling version of la vie de bohème; a nonsmoker as well as a nondrinker, he lapped up ice cream and orange juice in the cafes while other students had cigarettes and coffee or brandy. He tirelessly went to concerts, played bass in the academy orchestra ("I learned a lot about orchestra psychology"), and gravitated to the conducting classes of Hans Swarowsky. The revered teacher recognized in Mehta a "demoniac conductor" who "had it all." Nevertheless, he put Mehta through the usual drills: left hand in his pocket, right sleeve tied to a desk, conducting only with wrist movements of the right hand while Swarowsky sometimes paced behind him, muttering criticisms in three languages to test his concentration.
Shooting Star. "Go to the young conductors who are not making it," Mehta says, "and you will hear how we shouldn't push ourselves or sell ourselves, how they don't have the right connections and the right opportunities. Well, you can be sure they've had the opportunities. But to make your way in a conducting career, you not only have to have opportunities; you have to make them a success." Mehta began pushing and making successes—while still a student. After the Hungarian revolution in 1956, he organized a student orchestra in seven days and conducted it in a concert at a refugee camp outside Vienna. In 1958, he boldly programmed an all-Schoenberg concert, did so well that he parlayed it into further bookings.
Then, in quick succession, he married a pretty Canadian voice student named Carmen Lasky whom he had met in Vienna, won a prize in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic competition for young conductors, graduated from the