A raga (Sanskrit rāga राग, Tamil rāgam ராகம், Kannada "Raaga" ರಾಗ, Malayalam rāgam രാഗം literally "colour, hue" but also "beauty, melody"; also spelled raag, raaga, ragam) is one of the melodic modes used in Indian classical music.

A raga uses a series of five or more musical notes upon which a melody is constructed. However, it is important to remember that the way the notes are approached and rendered in musical phrases and the mood they convey are more important in defining a raga than the notes themselves. In the Indian musical tradition, rāgas are associated with different times of the day, or with seasons. Indian classical music is always set in a rāga. Non-classical music such as popular Indian film songs and ghazals sometimes use rāgas in their compositions.

Joep Bor of the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music defined Raga as "tonal framework for composition and improvisation."Nazir Jairazbhoy, chairman of UCLA's department of ethnomusicology, characterized ragas as separated by scale, line of ascent and descent, transilience, emphasized notes and register, and intonation and ornaments.

Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia (born 1 July 1938) is an Indian classical instrumentalist. He is a player of the bansuri, the Indian bamboo flute.

Hariprasad Chaurasia was born in Allahabad in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His father was a wrestler. His mother died when he was 6. He had to learn music without his father's knowledge, for his father wanted him to become a wrestler. He did go to the Akhada and train with his father for some time, although he also started learning music, and practising at his friend's house. He often credits his wrestling training for giving him the immense stamina and lung power that are the hallmarks of his flute playing, stating that,

Hariprasad Chaurasia started learning vocal music from his neighbor, Pandit Rajaram at the age of 15. Later, he switched to playing the flute under the tutelage of Pandit Bholanath Prasanna of Varanasi for eight years. He joined the All India Radio, Cuttack, Orissa in 1957 and worked as a composer and performer Much later, while working for All India Radio he received guidance from the reclusive Annapurna Devi, daughter of Baba Allaudin Khan.

Pran Nath is a theoretical physicist working at Northeastern University, with research focus in elementary particle physics. He holds a Matthews Distinguished University Professor chair.

His main area of research is in the fields of supergravity and particle physics beyond the standard model. He is one of the originators of the first supergravity theory in 1975. In 1982 in collaboration with Richard Arnowitt and Ali Hani Chamseddine, he developed the field of Applied Supergravity and the supergravity grand unification popularly known as SUGRA or mSUGRA model for gravity mediated breaking of supersymmetry. SUGRA models, and specifically mSUGRA, are currently the leading candidates for discovery at the Fermilab Tevatron and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He has contributed to further development of the field through studies of CP violation, predictions on muon anomalous moment gμ − 2 ahead of experiment, supersymmetric dark matter, discovery of the hyperbolic branch of radiative breaking of the electroweak symmetry, and detection of supersymmetric signal at colliders via the so called tri-leptonic signal. He has also made contribution to studies on stability of the proton in unified models. His early work concerns the invention of effective Lagrangian method, the first current algebra analysis of pion-pion scattering and solution to the notorious U(1) problem. His recent work has focused SO(10) grand unification, and on the Stueckelberg extensions of the Standard Model. In 1999 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for ”basic contributions in supersymmetry and supergravity”.

Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to with the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.

In 1956, he began to tour Europe and America playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continues to perform in the 2000s, often with his daughter Anoushka.

Aashish Khan Debsharma (Hindi: आशिष खान देबशर्मा, Urdu: آشیش خان) (born 5 December 1939) is an Indian classical musician, known for his virtuosity on the sarod. He was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2006 in the 'Best World Music' category for his album "Golden Strings of the Sarode". He is also a recipient of Government of India's highest honour in performing arts, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. Besides being a high-profile performer, composer, and conductor, he is also an adjunct professor of Indian classical music at the California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, in the United States.

Aashish Khan was born in 1939 at Maihar, a small princely state of British India, where his revered grandfather Ustad Alauddin Khan, founder of the "Senia Maihar Gharana" or "Senia Maihar School" of Indian classical music, was a royal court musician at that time. His mother the late Zubeida Begum was Ustad Ali Akbar Khan's first wife. He was initiated into North Indian classical music at the age of five by his grandfather. His training (or taalim) later continued under the guidance of his father Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, and his aunt, Annapurna Devi. Though the music school they represent is popularly known as "Senia Maihar Gharana"; it is essentially the traditional "Senia Gharana". (The founder of this "Senia Gharana" or "Senia School" is believed to be the court musician of Mughal Emperor Akbar Mian Tansen. "Senia Maihar Gharana" follows the traditional "Beenkar" and "Rababiya" pattern of the "Dhruvapada" style of the original "Senia Gharana". However, followers of the "Senia Maihar School" tradition have principally been responsible for a renaissance in Indian classical instrumental music in the twentieth century.