Kiran Ahluwalia
Toronto 43° 39' 12.53" N, 79° 23' 2.16" W Music Person
Ahluwalia was born in India and immigrated with her parents to Toronto, Canada as a child. After completing her MBA at Dalhousie University, she returned to Toronto with the plan of being in the financial services industry, but changed her mind and went back to India to study music. She returned to Toronto and found poets writing beautiful lyrics in the poetic form of ghazals, inspiring the beginnings of her musical career.
Ahluwalia started composing these poems and singing them in concert in Canada, India and Pakistan. She and a circle of poets have become a part of the evolution of ghazals, thousands of miles away from its origins.
Ahluwalias bi-cultural life experience has made her adept at reaching new audiences something evident in her thoughtful and modern explanations on stage. To one recent audience, she explained that ghazals explore the many moods of love, from the ecstatic to the despondent, from pursuing the beloved to feeling the restlessness of unrequited love, and summarized by describing a ghazal as a highly-literate pick up line. Kiran earned a Juno Award in 2004 for her album, 'Beyond Boundaries' and a second JUNO Award in 2012 for her album, 'aam zameen : common ground'.