SEEKING EAST: Harrison with sitar guru Ravi Shankar

It was a smoggy December evening in Delhi, probably the day before new year's eve in 1994. With my wife and two daughters, I was heading to a friend's house for dinner, when we stopped at a flower stall on a deserted stretch of the sidewalk across the circle near the Taj hotel. I bought some flowers and was about to start the car when my wife said, "That man standing there looks a bit like George Harrison."

I glanced casually around and froze. "That is George Harrison," I could hear myself whispering hoarsely. Even as my wife was coming up with her standard cautionary note on my life-"Don't be stupid"-I was out of the car and running towards the man. Harrison backed off a bit, looked alarmed but I had him cornered, and with no one around except a young lad-his son, as it turned out-and the flower stall owner.

"You're Mr Harrison, aren't you?" I panted.

"Yes, yes. Calm down, and don't shout it out," he said, or words to that effect.

I remember asking silly questions. Did he play the lead on Something, or was it Eric Clapton? Yes, he replied, he did, Clapton was on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. (Dammit, I must have sounded like an idiot). I tried a few other lines on music before dissolving into asking about the weather. That's when he held forth. He talked about the pollution in Delhi, about how he had come to stay for a month with Ravi Shankar, his sitar guru, about how he loved India but liked being away from publicity.

I wrote about the encounter in The Times of India the next day. Yes, he had indicated he didn't want the press to know about his presence, but, hey, I rationalised, the Beatles were public property, even the Quiet One, with his preference for peace and solitude.

Well, he has his peace now, but he can never hope to gain solitude. He was a part of us from all over the world who grew up in the Sixties, and he'll stay with us here, there, and everywhere. As I explained recently to a bunch of friends-American, European, Latin American, Indian-who had gathered to spend a "Beatles night" here, I had heard my first Beatles' song-Please, Please Me-in Calcutta in late 1963, even before the Americans had seen them live on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. They were already more than just another rock 'n' roll band. Their harmonies, their use of British folk music, their humour, and their in-your-face attitude, to say nothing of their hair and clothes, had begun to earn them a rapidly growing following around the world.

The fever had spread to India. By early 1965, Shammi Kapoor, our Elvis-cum-Jerry Lewis, had donned a Beatle wig in Janwar and done the "shake" to a smash hit Hindi rip-off of I Wanna Hold Your Hand. But it was the release of the then-intriguing compositions of Rubber Soul the same year that had made people everywhere sit up.

By then, the Beatles had begun to expound on war and peace. Paul McCartney was the first to speak out against the Vietnam War, John Lennon was revealing his hard edge as a radical pacifist. And George Harrison was discovering India, its musical as well as spiritual traditions, which combined to become a driving influence on the group's work, both in its music and its ideology of peace and love. The theme that ran through their songs and attitude, and what attracted so many of us to their creed, was one of a mocking anti-elitism combined with a reaching out-with a little help from the growing presence of global television and some nifty marketing-to ordinary folk everywhere.

I later wondered why I hadn't done a better job of interviewing Harrison that evening. I could have asked how he thought of introducing Indian classical music to the Beatles, or even how he had in the first place come to understand and appreciate the complex but seemingly chaotic ragas, moods and seasonal contexts of Indian music, which is structured so differently from the simple three-chord progressions of old time rock 'n' roll and from the grand architecture of western classical.

I could have asked him profound questions about their impact on a changing world. I could have asked him why he had kept up his association with India, when the other Beatles had tired of it quickly after a three-month sojourn in Rishikesh in the late 1960s. And, what instinct had prompted him to organise the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971.

I'll never get to ask those questions. But I won't have to. To know about a man of history, you can read, research, and reinterpret everything he said and you can analyse, deconstruct, and reconstruct everything he did. What he was and how he thought, would be a maze of interpretations.

Only one thing will remain unalloyed in my mind: his pure music. That was something.

Gautam Adhikari, a former executive editor of The Times of India, is a senior consultant with the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.