"It was absolutely amazing", Ricky Kej recalls winning Grammy award first time

New Delhi [India], August 16 : Grammy Award-winning music composer and environmentalist, Ricky Kej recalled the first time he won the Grammy award and how was the overall experience.
In an exclusive conversation with ANI, he spoke about winning the first Grammy in 2015 for his album, ‘Winds of Samsara’, “The Grammy is always felt like an unattainable dream. It's not something that would cross one's mind, especially while performing non-mainstream music while seated in India. You watched the Grammy Awards on television, and that was the end of it, but my first Grammy was when I was 33 years old. The nominations are announced in December. I was extremely shocked to be nominated. It was absolutely amazing.”
He remembered how he got to know that he has been nominated. “It was nighttime in India and daytime in Los Angeles. While I was sleeping, I kept getting phone notifications on my phone. On each notification, I saw Grammy, and I thought, Oh, I got nominated for a Grammy. There is a two-month waiting period before the actual award ceremony. I spoke with my parents and the musicians who contributed to the album. Everyone kept asking me if I was nervous, and I responded that I wasn't,” he added.
Surely it was a magical moment for Kej and he was excited and nervous too. “I wore a tuxedo because I wanted to blend in and follow the dress code. However, later I wore Indian because I realised that is what I should be doing. When I went to the ceremony, that is when I started getting nervous. All of the legends I admired were sitting with me, and I realised that this was the actual Grammy award I was up for."
Fortunately for me, our category was the first to be announced, because I can't imagine sitting there without fainting if it had been the fifth or sixth, but because it was the first, I was named the winner. It's a long and exhausting process.”
He continued to share the overall experience, “I just carried two bars of chocolate in my pocket because people warned me that, 'you will get very hungry', so I did. It is a stressful process because once you win the Grammy, you are taken backstage and you have to sign a contract, meet a bunch of people, and take pictures. Then there are media rooms 33 to 35 where you have to go and give interviews and then there is a press conference, so it is a one-and-a-half-hour process and then you are back in your hotel room and it is daytime in India, so people start calling you and for two or three weeks. So people start calling you, and for the next two or three weeks, it's a nonstop process, and you don't have time to sit back and bask in the glory of receiving all of this stuff.”
Kej won his third Grammy Award for the album 'Divine Tides' with rock-legend Stewart Copeland. This song was Kej's collaborative project with Copeland and they bagged another Grammy for Best New Age Album in 2022. However, Kej found his third win as magical as the first one.
He shared, “It’s still very magical, as if for the first time. When it comes to awards, there are two ways to look at it. One is a vanity that oh, I'm better than everybody else and whatnot. I think that's a very wrong perspective to look at awards because you should not look at awards as a competition that has been won. I believe that especially with the kind of music I've made, which is all about advocacy and spreading the message of awareness, spreading the message of taking action in our own lives, and all of that. Awards are important because awards give you the opportunity to do better things and reach a large number of people.”