I have been a Beatles fan for as long as I can remember. My earliest introduction to the “Fab Four” was via an old cassette tape called A Collection Of Beatles’ Oldies gifted to me on my 12th birthday. I heard She Loves You, Can’t Buy Me Love, Eleanor Rigby, A Hard Day’s Night, Day Tripper and Yellow Submarine so many times, I eventually wore the tape out.
Over the decades, I have read every book and watched every documentary about the Beatles I could possibly lay my hands on (including Peter Jackson’s 8-hour long TV series, The Beatles: Get Back, twice).
It would be accurate to say that The Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh in 1968 holds special fascination for their fans. Spiritually exhausted by their meteoric rise to international fame, the musicians stayed at Mahesh Yogi’s ashram for a few weeks to learn Transcendental Meditation and find some peace of mind. (Ajoy Bose’s excellent book, Across the Universe: The Beatles in India contains a fascinating account of their initially euphoric but increasingly tense and trouble-filled time there).
Imagine my thrill when in 2015 I learnt that Mahesh Yogi’s ashram, or “The Beatles Ashram” as it is more commonly known, had been officially opened to the public by the Rajaji Tiger Reserve, where one could walk around the ruins for a fee.
I finally managed to visit the derelict ashram in early 2018 and found myself fascinated by the scores of stone meditation pods, the cottages where the Beatles stayed (still recognisable by the bamboo lattice work from photos of Lennon and McCartney sitting in white kurta pajamas playing their guitars) and the mural of the Fab Four in the large meditation hall where the Maharishi addressed his followers.
That day, I told myself I would return one day and sing Beatles songs there.
Six years later, I returned to the ashram along with fellow fans on the second last day of 2024, mini guitar in hand, ready to sing Yellow Submarine and With a Little Help From My Friends, songs I had learned just for this occasion.
But we only got as far as the ticket counter.
An officious forest reserve guard informed us imperiously, “Guitar is not allowed inside.”
It took a second for the irony of the situation to register. I tried to reason with him.
“As you know, the Beatles are some of the most famous musicians in the world. They played guitars. I am a fan of the Beatles. I also play the guitar. I would like to go in, sit under a tree and sing a couple of songs. Quietly, so as not to disturb others,” I replied.
The guard’s cold tone then turned rude.
“This is not the Beatles ashram,” he snapped. “This is Chaurasi Kutir.”
That’s when the penny dropped.
I realised that “Vishwaguru-itis,” the national sickness which views anything not “purely Indian” as substandard and second-rate, had infected this fellow too. It was quite clear he was resentful – or had been made to feel resentful – of the fact that the 14 acres of the culturally significant land he was supposed to guard was better known by a band of western musicians.
I pulled out my phone and showed him the location quite clearly marked as “Beatles Ashram” on Google Maps, even though the sign on the entrance said “Chaurasi Kutir” (Hindi for the 84 huts or meditation pods there).
The guard, sounding curiously like the WhatsApp uncles I thought I had left behind in the big city, responded with, “Google Maps is written by people like you.”
He then called his superior out of the ticket booth who also told us with a fair degree of condescension that guitars are not allowed because “people come in here and make reels.”
This was clearly a ridiculous argument. We pointed out to him that no one who was carrying a phone and could make a reel was being stopped, so why were we?
But it was like talking to a brick wall (or WhatsApp Uncle).
Both the guards had, quite clearly, been told by their superiors that carrying a guitar inside a place made famous by some of history’s most famous guitarists somehow went against the ethos of the place.
The exchange reminded me of comedian and filmmaker Varun Grover’s futile attempts to reason with security guards at shopping malls. In one of his shows, Grover talked about how he has tried asking guards which terrorists would be stupid enough to stand in line at a mall with a bomb on their person? Also, he asked them what they would do if they actually, God forbid, found one? Whack it away with their security batons?
For his troubles, Grover says he has been asked to step aside and rebuked by mall security for asking perfectly logical and sensible questions. He concludes that the fundamental problem with Indian society is that from a very young age, we are taught to obey authority figures unthinkingly and unquestioningly, and anyone who dares to question a pointless rule or tradition is branded a troublemaker.
Add to that culture of non-thinking a dash of ethno-chauvinism, and we end up with situations like the one I had just encountered in Rishikesh.
I suggested to my travelling companions that we raise the matter with a higher authority, to which one of them said, “Really? You want to argue the merits of bringing a guitar into the Beatles’ ashram with functionaries of a government that just denied a former prime minister a cremation befitting his stature?”
I saw her point.
We finally decided that going into the Beatles Ashram (I still choose to call it that) without my guitar would be tantamount to obeying a senseless and arbitrary rule and so, we simply drove away.
And as we did, I thought of a Beatles number:
With every mistake
We must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don’t know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don’t know how you were inverted
No one alerted you
I look from the wings
At the play you are staging
While my guitar gently weeps
That song, incidentally, was written by George Harrison after his return from Rishikesh.
Rohit Kumar is an educator and can be reached at letsempathize@gmail.com.
